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Posts Tagged ‘IT’

As I contemplate my personal future and at the age of 65, had discounted going back into IT as a possibility and would have to seek a different ‘trade’, but then I was taken aback yesterday to realise that perhaps I should not have been so hasty, there are still idiots out there complete with loon pants on ! On reflection, I thought that perhaps, I was far too quick on ‘discounting’ the knowledge that I have built up over the years and should review that.

The reality is simply determined by the “business goals” and translating those into ‘business outcomes’ is what IT is all about, the technology is very much secondary. What occasioned this was me writing some comments against an article in the “Indy” on the Coalition Governments Freedom Bill:http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-a-victory-for-civil-liberties-ndash-and-a-challenge-for-labour-2209670.html#comment-144334168

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I was highly amused to see that an American Academic Sherry Turkle has described “Social Networking Sites” as a modern form of madness, I totally agree with her and only wonder why it has taken so long for anybody to say it. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/8276948/Social-networking-sites-are-a-modern-form-of-madness.html

Quote: “Her warnings – and those from other cyber-sceptics – follow the death of Simone Back, a woman in Brighton who posted a suicide note on Facebook that was seen by more than 1,000 of her “friends”. Yet none of them called for help – instead trading insults with each other on her Facebook wall.”

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Many years ago when I first became involved in computing there was a wonderful American computer magazine called ‘Byte’ which has sadly disappeared. The thing I loved about it was that it would take a concept such as say “Data Mining” and explore the topic from different view points in a series of feature articles each month so that by the end and however exotic the topic seemed, you ended up with a basic understanding.

Amusingly and in different ways, at the end of each months special feature they would end up with saying something along the following lines: “So this is the future of computing or, maybe just a bit of it…” I was reminded of this when reading an article on ‘Cloud Computing’: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/look-up-its-the-future-learning-to-love-the-cloud-2180196.html

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The Economist which allows limited free web browsing of its paper but also sells subscriptions, had an interesting piece concerning the problems that Media organisations face with getting on-line readers to contribute to their costs : http://www.economist.com/node/17853358 “The Crucible of Print”.

The problem has been the collapse of the old business model of Fleet Street where it was the advertising revenue rather than the cover price which made them profitable in the past. In a sense, newspapers are in the same state that HMV is with CD sales, their old market is falling away and although ‘download sales’ may compensate them in time, they are not growing fast enough to compensate immediately. Besides which, it may not be that the business model survives anyway because even digital sales are flagging, something else is likely happening which needs to be ‘discovered’.

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An interesting and quite amusing article the other day in the Telegraph called “Tablets and Mobile Phones” led me to contemplate the potential: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/ces/8240216/CES-2011-tablets-and-mobile-phones.html

This was of course, bought about by the opening of the CES Show in California. I think CES stands for ‘Consumer Electronics Show’ but in reality, it is a boy’s toys Gizmo event rather than the latest “domestic white goods”. But all that said, it did start a train of thought for me based upon the “latest toys for over grown boys” and the following is the result…

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In simple terms and as usual, I just don’t have any because frankly I cannot see just why that a particular hour on a particular day will make you ‘do something’ you clearly have no desire to do like giving up smoking, losing weight, going to the gym 4 times a week and so on and so forth. When it comes to such “Giving Up/Doing Better Stakes” and even with the most ‘benign alignment of planets’, midnight on the 31^st December really just isn’t motivational in any way.

The key to any ‘lifestyle change’ (what a toss pot phrase that is), lies in a personal motivation: “I want to lose weight because I hate what I look like in a mirror” or, “I know it’s unhealthy but also, smoking is really just too expensive, I’m spending £70 a week on it !”

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There was an article in today’s Telegraph about WikiLeaks and “the hunt for British hackers” which unusually for the Telegraph attracted rather a lot of mushy brain comments about ‘Hackers being heroes’ best describes the drift : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8205029/Wikileaks-haven-for-Julian-Assange-as-British-hackers-are-hunted-by-police.html

As is often the case, the comments from people to the article are more interesting than the actual thing itself and set off a train of thought…

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Today Julia Assange was appealing against not being granted bail whilst his extradition proceedings come to Court and in this he is right under the Rule of Law because unless he poses a significant threat of “flight” so that he may not answer any charges bought against him, he is innocent until proved guilty and therefore ‘allegations’ should not deprive him of his freedom.

However it was noticeable just how many ‘media stories’ about various UK Government web sites being under threat from the brainless sub species who call themselves “Anonymous”. These stories were about them launching “Cyber Attacks” on the Tax and Benefits Systems and the latter, most likely is what these acne loaded idiots rely on most for their ‘supplies’. “Yeah, Peace and Love, we really are big rebels but still can’t get a job or a shag…ugh !”

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Apparently, the WikiLeaks web site has obtained a lot of internal documents from a major Bank and intends to publish them in the New Year, for now they are content to drip feed American diplomatic documents and rely on their press friends like The Guardian to try and ‘sensationalise’ any contents that they come up with.

In parallel with this though and as the American Government has tried to put the ‘squeeze’ on the WikiLeaks operations, we have seen a group of hackers called ‘Anonymous’ launch cyber attacks, against Mastercard, Visa, Amazon and PayPal. The problem is that taken together, these events contradict the ‘Anonymous’ claims that they are trying to keep the Internet open and free because they bring into play another unelected, self appointed and unaccountable group, THEMSELVES so that if there is tyranny, all they seek to do is replace one tyranny with another, their own which makes them less freedom fighters than would be Hitlers.

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It is both amusing if rather sad also that one only need put “Pope” somewhere in a headline to bring out a lot of lickspittle spite from those who are anti theist by default or those who consider themselves “far too intellectually smart”, no different whether in the reader’s columns of the Telegraph, Independent or Guardian.

I suppose my conclusion on these things is quite simple, the Pope must be doing something right to attract such mindless bile because the opposite of Love is not Hate, it is indifference.

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