What's happening to the US of A?

That's what he meant you daft 'apeth

 

Well it kind of proves it works sometimes.
I find my pc to be the most unreliable piece of electrical equipment in the house, if other stuff suffered from the same kind of problems that a computer does, I'm sure I would be queuing to get my money back.

 

Ah well you see, that's where it all goes wrong.

There are two ways to run a big IT project.

1. Get a businessman to take care of it all. Choose somebody who looks at the financial side. Somebody who knows all about how to charge for the air we breath, how to claim R&D grants for pieces of work that are simply not necessary. Negotiate a a payment structure that rewards you for 'bums in seats' rather than technical capability.

2. Get a techy to take care of it all. Choose someone who lives and breathes the technology, who does it for 'fun' and just happens to get paid for it. Choose someone with people skills who can work with and be part of a team. Someone who couldn't care less about politics and will willingly and happily tear up and mock a proposal that doesn't contribute anything useful.

Option 1 is how the large outsourcing firms work. They will hire literally thousands of people on low wage then charge them out to the client at around £750 per person per day, and many of those people will be unskilled. Simply there to make up the numbers. Sure, for audit purposes they'll actually be given a job title and some work to do, and they will actually be productive, but their reason for being there is not to get the project completed, but simply as a reason to cross-charge.

Option 2 is how I prefer to work, and how managers I like work. And incidentally, that comment about tearing up bad proposals was not entirely metaphorical. I once caused a great stir and much chuckling among my peers in a past employment in a very large outsourcing firm, when having got to about page 3 or 4 of a proposal and declared it to be a loada animal byproduct based garden fertiliser, I stood up, made a great show of walking to the shredder, shredded it, told my boss I'd done so, and then went back to my desk to get on with some actual work.

 

Just a slightly interesting thought for us. We're all living in 'interesting times' in terms of technology. Those of us alive today are likely to witness something no other generation has or or will. I'm on about the advent of true AI (artificial intelligence). For decades now we've had software that ticks some of the boxes, in that its able to learn (within extremely tight parameters) and adapt its self (again within extremely tight parameters). But hardware and software have come on loads recently, and much of the 'functional programming' capability that used to tie up a very powerful CPU now happens in real time in your graphics hardware (in fact many researchers in the sciences have adapted graphics chips to that end, because they are many times more powerful than the main CPU when it comes to calculations relating to 'natural' processes).

I don't reckon it will be too long now before computers can actually throw a wobbler, and not simply malfunction, but actually misbehave. Much like a child might misbehave when they find themselves (as they always do) in a situation where they don't have enough learned experience to choose a more appropriate response.

 

Computers with 'the terrible two's' built in........sales will plummet!

 

Now you're scaring me!

 

Cant remember the last time my TV caught a virus, and I was expected to part with cash, to some rip off company, just to avoid it.
And then find the rip off merchants dont actually work.

 

That will be normal enough soon enough. Since they switched off the analogue signal, everyone has to be digital now. For now, there are still lots of older analogue tellies running off set top boxes, but newer tellies have a computer and an internet connection all of their own.

Not tellies but kind of related, my mate's phone picked up a virus a few weeks ago. It texted everybody in his phone book with an invite to view some very dodgy website.

 

Armandii you certainly know how to string a sentence mate

 

Has he still got the link?