Posts by Adam Salisbury

Well Shirley...

...He can plead infringment of his 1st Admendment rights again, just as he did to oveturn the social networking ban and by using a similar arguement to the one that saw the malware clause amended.

I'd argue that some systems require compulsory encryption measures (online banking goverment websites etc) and his inabilty to use them would be a curtailment of his freedoms (or something!)

"Actually I quite like learning from failure. I think we learn a lot that way."

That a pretty much vertical curve for our Government! Gershon's completely missed the point when he talks about skills shortages for starters; the governemnt spends far too much money on overpriced consultancy becuase there's no-one in governement with the sufficent knowledge of IT.

What they should be doing is bringing some real skilled technical staff in on a permanent basis to deliver existing projects so they can stop paying the consultants. His comment that there will be a skills shortage a result of job losses is complete tosh, the already is a skills shortage and now they need to shed jobs they'll have to carry on paying hand over fist.

That and his "I'm not going comment on procurement, I'm doing project management is a) a spineless cop out and b) indictative of the asre-covering nature of ministers and c) a damning indictment of how blinkered they are, without visibilty of the wider picture nothing will change.

A Long Time Coming

Bearing in mind 64bit hardware has been with us for years now anyone upgrading to Windows 7 should most definitely go 64, we're doing it now and haven't had any problems in so doing. While it's still not yet essential it soon will be if you consider all the new technolgies being developed today; UEFI, 3+ TB hard disks and ever increasing memory requirements mean making the change now will be more cost effective than waiting until you're pushed to do so.

Not only that but the more people who switch the more incentive there is for developers to finally moveto the world of 64bit too. The general concensus amoung our beloved code monkeys seems to be the inherent difficulty in writing much more expansive and multithreaded code, furhter uptake will bring us better tools to overcome this.

F**k contactless payment

How about making chip n' pin secure? How about redesigning VilifiedByVisa and SecrueCrap so they actually provide MORE security than they erode, THEN they can start thinking about contactless payment becuase so far even all form RFID/NFC have been proven easily snoopable, think of the American e-border-type project on the Mexican border and an Oyster-like card for public transit in Boston? You know, the one that when broken saw the feds bury the findings of the whitehats who exploited it?

Once we're not using any cash at all think of the (ever more) liability the banks will foist upon us.

If they want this technology in use it should be submitted to whitehats and assorted pen testers before market.

No more power users

I think in terms of hardware we have reached a point where everyone can use the same standard kit, the only modifications being more powerful graphics adapters or more RAM. For instance, I use the exact same make and model laptop our Sales Director does and surely thats's a job in which you're considered a power user.

Bu then again, the power user is a complete myth most of the time, all they are is users of status who feel they should have something different to, and better than, the proles. the point made in the article about systems being perceived as personal rather than a business tool could'nt be more correct hence the higher up in the org cart you go the better the systems get.

I'd like to know if anyone who's "power users" now have iPhones for business use actually issued them after sound technological assessment or just because the executives starting using them. It's the sames with software too, announce your Windows 7 rollout and watch the number of "accidents" which require a replacement soar!

Bad times

We're one step closer to nothing but Android or iOS, Apple vs. Google and they're both companies I always love having less to do with

It's not the first time by far

I've regularly been told than an app using one of my former profile pics was claiming me as a happy user of whatever shit service or product they were peddling. So it's defnitely not the first nor will it be the last. FB solely exists to scrape and scrape and scrape as this Zynga thing proves entirely, Zuckerburg probably knows and is even more likely to be skimming a layer off the top, how else do you pay for global datacentres?

Glad I'm rid of the fscking thing now, I shall rue the day I was foolish enough to have been zuckered in for a long time to come!

FFS

As if advertising isn't already insulting, patronising, condescending and invasive we're now inflicting it on the rest of the universe!?!! Whether or not there's anyone out there eyeing up this blue-green bag of pepprami sticks we call home it just seems like we're being noisy neighbours now, blaring jibbersh out the windows with reckless abandon!

It beggars belief that the boffins haven't thought about carefuly enough, besides there are far better things to beam into space than Dixons ads!

Cutting (or at least loosening) the Gordian knot

Virtaully every organisation I've worked for has at one point or another embarked upon the same excerise and when you really start trying to calculate that it can become impossibly difficult. It 's everso easy to keep unravelling the minuatae of every process, work instruction and interaction, for instance; how to you calculate and cross-charge the cost of an engineer's time wasted by a user-inflicted IT issue (such as installing unauthorised software) or by a user who's lied or withheld a crucial nugget of information required to diagnose the fault (c'mon, we've ALL done it!).

I did work for an emplyer who must've eventually worked it out as all of a sudden desktop computer equipment was charged to the budget of the department requesting it (inc. cost of replacements and third-party engineer visits), the same for software too. Departmental projects that required the services of tech support would have to budget for the cost of the bodies they'd need.

However even with a rough idea of the cost and some measures of mitigation so much in a more general sense comes out of the IT budget than really should. Our cost centre used to bear the brunt of the cost of servicing and maintaining infrastructure equipment bought using capex. The reason the equipment had been capexed was that it comprised the core systems everyone used so it shouldn't come from one budget!

While many of the examples I've used admittedly involve shifting wooden dollars around sometime the best method of prepresenting 'The True Cost of IT' s to position the department almost as if it's a contractor, calculating and billing each department for the services and equipment they use. Whatever your approach, first agree a upon a level of detail you won't exceed, one that's managable for you and your business

Epic lulz

So this means 64bit versions of Windoze can address exabytes of RAM but only terabytes of hard disk space!?!! And you still can't load the whole OS into RAM! What monkeys have they got writing their code, are they able of thinking even a few months beyond the planned ship date or their OS du jour?

These new disks are quite the unexpectedly jab in the eye for an ever more prehistoric software house who're lagging behind all their competitors...again!

You had me until...

"But the odd and sad thing is that, if true, it's Microsoft acknowledging competition in a market that five years from now no one will care about"

No-one will care about, at all, really?? Granted Microsoft's stranglehold on "fat-client" Office products will almost certainly become less significant, largely due to Google Docs and even Microsoft's hosted Office offering. If OpenOffice can hone in it's interoperability then as many commenters have said, it'll become a contender.

But we're still a way off in terms of mass uptake of the alternatives, cloud offerings still need to be proven robust enough for mission ciritcal work and I suspect that in five years the fight for the lion's share of a hitherto unbreakable market could just be hotting up.

Rampant consumerism finally abating?

This three year refresh cycle is pretty much rubbish for most organisations, just a window dressing excerise in many cases As a result of the tough business conditions we're facing and a recent. costly merger and subsequent "syngerisation" and office move our little SMB is still running on 6 year old kit that isn't breaking a sweat yet...and it's all Wintel/Microsoft servers and laptops.

With virtualisation coming into it's own it's becoming more and more easy to extend the life of much your kit, the justifications for most upgrades are speculative and mostly intangible, existing only to make the case for a budget equal to, or bigget than last year's.

The salefolk always say they "need" the most shiny laptops and phones to convey an image of professionalism and competence (as if having the most shiny trinket would indeed fool anyone). Finance will always plump for bigger and better desktops for heavy-duty number crunching and as they pay the wages they'll nearly always get them!

It's always going to be a nightmare justifying the pruchase of more infrastructure kit as it's very difficult to measure a person's productivity and therefore how much revenue is generated by said productivity, especially if you're not performing a "revenue leading" role (sales, project manager, account mamanger etc).

It's something companies really need to sort out because while it's diffcult to quantify the benefits of having better, faster systems it's very, very easy to qunatify the cost of an ageing server coughing up it's disks or the comany's website or CRM spontaneously combusting at the end-of-quater!

I wanna live in a Tegra house too!

But what happens when you hit your monthly bandwidth cap eh? It's been obvious for a while (since x64 architecture IMHO) that hardware horsepower will always be knee-capped by either the internet pipe if we're talking cloud services or by software limitations if we're talking about 64bit and parrallel systems.

All these cloud/HPC evangalists keeping underestimating the desire of people to have some CPUs at home as well as in the datacentre, they seem to have put the cart before the horse by trying to finding reasons to use something they've already built (rather than the other way around)

Drag 'em over the coals!

If that's not a scareware message then I don't know what is, it's exactly the same kind of "alert" the nefarious malware vendors use to dupe the n00bs and for an IT serucity firm to do the same is unforgivable.

These kinds of things are looking more and more realistic and believable all the time with these jokers adding to the FUD, times must be hard and money short at Check Point for them to stoop to this

At bleedin last!!!

Normally I'm not a fan of the Googleplex but give them a hand for beign the first to do what the IT security industry should've been doing years ago - bring two-factor authentication to consumers, the only other exception I know of being Barclays.

Bout damned time!

I'll be reserving judgement

Going on Intel's treack history of graphics adapter performance (including the ones they made Vista Basic for) I'll be sticking to my AMD/nVidia for the foreseeable future

That real entity rule...

That non-realistic gaming rule certainly hobbles Apple's attempts at pitching the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch as an alternative portable gaming platform.

Methinks this is just yet more off-the-cuff abitrary thinking we've come to expect of Apple, I'd almost wager money on rule being changed within a month. Or at least that long until a mini-scandal about The App Store Stasi breaking their own rules!