sorry for ruining the dodgy analogy, but in the UK FMCG market (fast moving consumer goods), brands do pay the supermarkets for premium shelf space - and they will pay varying amounts depending on whether the goods are at eyeline etc.
the problem with brand push economics is that it is not transparent to the public and will end up in some sort of sleazy monopolistic situation where some providers are being given preferential treatment over others no matter what is being paid.
in terms of cost - it isn't a user problem in my view. The finance company I consult at has its entire sales platform built on VB6/IIS5 and (shock horror) VBScript so it only works on IE6. This was sold to them as an approach by MS back in the day - the platform will cost over $20m - $30m to replace... It hasn't helped that the weakness of the VB6/IIS platform for enterprise software has made it very hard to replace (no business effective tier separation, lack of rules engine, poor security approach etc) and MS did not provide an upgrade approach to.NET for large platforms.
We're just waiting now for the sales to drop off (or the phone lines to be swamped) as our business to business customers get their browsers upgraded and don't buy online from us. We've got $m's worth of projects on the go to replace the platform but the business feels it has been strongarmed into replacing the platform with a like for like replacement with no business advantage.i.e. they are set back 2 years to get to the same place we are at now.
In a way, this is a blessing in disguise because MS is never going to be selling enterprise solutions (beyond file & print) here again and now open source is certainly not frowned upon and is a real contender for big enterprise systems. It's certainly not fluff - This organisation deals with a quarter of the population of UK and employes 10's of thousands of people.
back in the day - Gran Turismo (the popular playstation driving game) used to have AI cars that would make driving errors such as braking too late into corners or oversteering and spinning out onto the grass.
It used to have hilarious consequences as AI cars behind the spinning-out-of-control AI car would crash into it, deflecting and causing a complete pile up.
This gameplay felt realistic because this is what happens when cars are travelling at high speed in close formation.
Newer versions of Gran Turismo on the Playstation 3 - have way more computation cycles and so the AI cars now drive a whole lot better and never seem to crash. Sure they take different lines into corners and so on - but they don't completely bollox it up like the human drivers often do. It has made the game pretty infuriating because it has taken a randomness factor out of the game.
do you think the car at 7'oclock on the big corner was parked without applying the handbrake? it looks like it has rolled backwards down the hill.
Re:Single provider and SOA?
on
The Zen of SOA
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· Score: 2, Insightful
say your sole data provider is credit card payment system, or a database or whatever. The key is that if you wrap a data service round that source - and you map out business services such as:
authorise Payment
Validate PIN Number
Process Settlement
Process Transaction Reversal
Then if you get fed up with the provider of the credit card system then you have the chance to change suppliers without regression testing or rewriting any of the clients. Of course, it also works the other way around. Because you have a tightly defined *business* interface then you can add clients without having to regression test all the others and the backend system.
Clearly, you get the biggest benefit if you are a large organisation - the org I work at has 12m customers and 3500 staff with a history of many expensive silo'ed systems - so the systems are complex and varied. We have an SOA culture thats trangressed the crappy buzzwords and sales crap from IBM et al. Anyone who knows their stuff about enterprise IT should be doing this already.
sorry to post after my own post, but I just found the source - it was £60m, not £26 - I heard 26m on a gartner call last year! here is a link to tharticle in Computing Magazine
rubbish - SOA is not just about technology - it is the ability to design business services that relate to the business objectives and processes of an organisation. Organisations that try to produce SOA by starting with technology are doomed to failure!
The trick is to implement services into various layers ranging from business to technology fucuses so that maximum orchestration and thus allows reuse to occur.
Some organisations use mainstream Enterprise Service Buses (ESB) that provide communication protocols (like web services, MQ, Tibco RV, even XML & HTTP), data mapping, orchestration and provide containers that support runtime contracts for services. Not all are OO, not all are Java - Intel even sell one implemented in hardware, quite a few are open source - and this is where open source is a much more convincing argument for large blue chip orgs - especially those who have been driven into WebLogic,.NET, Websphere technology cul-de-sacs in the past...
One Scottish assurer claims to be saving £26m a year - we're not quite saving that much yet - but our enterprise SOA is showing massive savings in producing back office systems for our call centres and admin & processing.
one of the larger UK ISPs Nildram.net had a massive problem with its Radius authentication servers at 2356Hrs GMT on Hogmany. Total pain in the arse because we were about to VOIP friends etc. We tried to switch to our backup 3G net connection but the phone networks were totally flooded with all those "happy new year" txt messages, vidcalls and so on.
I found the extensions very useful: I used a slightly modified LDAP Extension to integrate with the MS Active Directory used here (in a non-standard way).
yes looked at some commercial wikis (like confluence) and J2EE based options. A big plus for mediawiki is that most users are familiar with wikipedia even if they haven't ever contributed to it. For thos evaluating, I found wikimatrix a useful place to start - although, paper exercises are no subsitute to trying the stuff out.
I was in the market for a wiki engine for a top-100 UK company. It seemed, during the investigation phase, that twiki was too good to be true - until we found that the founder and main contributor polluted just about every forum with "use twiki" messages whether it was sensible or not. It met our shortlist and so we installed it, but, it didn't meet our criteria on usability, administration and we found it to be quite slow. I think the 'founder' had raised expectations a little too high on all those forums he posted to...
Certainly, we now have an open source policy that looks into the organisation of the hosting project to look out for these sorts of shenanigans before we use it. Certainly, I think the twiki situation is more about the personality of the 'founder' than anything and I would steer clear of a project that is behaving like this until the project board are more stabilised. it's happened before, and it will happen again.
We went with mediawiki and its been a real success and culture changing event for the organisation - encouraging some of the staff to send in fixes and create extensions to be shared with the community. The success of mediawiki software and the mediawiki project as a whole has now opened up the discussion on Linux, JBoss and other open source platforms in this once closed-source-only organisation.
My advice is to evaluate the merits of your software shortlist on EQUAL basis. Get your decision makers to agree criteria for the selection of software BEFORE starting your evaluation and then choose the best scientifically. Factor in initial capital spend, running costs, feature-match and roadmap. The best software might not always be OSS although I've found many OSS and quasi OSS to have a very compelling business cases.
In case you are interested (in various contracts), The following have been the ones I've seen the most:
RedHat ES and CentOS - interestingly, in practice CentOS leads to a lot of RH ES licences
Apache Jakarta is used in most large enterprise financial organisations that use J2EE, its hard to see a successful J2EE system without it
MediaWiki/MySQL and tactical Intranet CMS's (so many to choose from)
The Eclipse IDE is definitely the market leader out there
JBoss is winning sales out of WebLogic, Oracle IaS but not Websphere.
What I'm not really seeing in my customers even though I'd really like to:
Desktop Linux or a thin terminal linux offering like Sun Microsystems SunRay
MySQL instead of Oracle/DB2
Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice
One of my recent customers has a big investment problem with their VB6/IIS5.0 platform - they have invested 2 or so million GBP (double that for USDollars) and find themselves unable to upgrade to.NET now that MS platform has gone "out of support" this is due to the poorly architected platform and in part their poor use of the platform - it is these contracts where OSS is winning (OSS Java Enterprise and some are looking at LAMP) because clients are ultra sensitive about commercial lock in...
I use the Trekstor Vibez that has the benefit of being linux compatible, works beautifully with OGG (all my tunes are Ogg) and also is based on the Sigmatel chipset that is a later version of the popular Rio hardware - so has true gapless playback, Rio DJ and proper sound profiling.
sadly, if you've been reading the news over the last few weeks you'd have noticed that the Europeans are very much paying for the USA's last decade of blatent over-spending. Many of the Euro governments have had to sink billions of euros into propping up financial organisations that have had exposure to USA bad debt. Unfortunately, the financial markets are so closely linked that this opulence has now caused a debt-domino effect and spread throughout the world.
Also, some economists would say that because crude oil is priced in US$; that has allowed the USA government to be able to operate at a massive national debt level since the 70's.
It's worthwhile standing back from it all and just accepting that neither of the systems is right or wrong. Just a little different.
The problem with this is that Luxemburg has well known lax regulations for banking and is a well known tax haven - that has seriously pissed off the German government for harbouring criminals and tax evaders. Also, they have strict banking secrecy laws so that Paypal can operate autonomously reporting to no-one.
Re:You could at least explain what you mean
on
Tech Vs. Business?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I've worked in many financial firms doing enterprise IT - typically "The Business" is a group of business analysts that sit between IT (usually known as Production or Manufacturing) and the business stakeholders (i.e. those who own 'accounts' or lines of profitable business streams).
The Business are "supposed to be" experts in deriavitives, swaps, banking, finance or whatever and they ellucidate requirements to the IT folks who concentrate on building the systems. In smaller firms, or tech based companies, this distinction rarely exists.
There is always a degree of tension between the two departments because the IT folk think the business are stupid (because the IT folks generally become more expert at the financial business than The Business) and The Business believe the IT crowd to be slow, expensive and pedantic.
its because IT folks do not communicate the degree of difficulty that non-functional requirements are to deliver - because we think that The business are too stupid to understand.
also, in finance, it is The Business that get the big bonuses and on more than one occasion, I have heard business units say "They built the systems" when all they did is deliver a sub-standard list of untested requirements and manage some ill thought out user acceptance testing.
funnily enough, I was out as an observer on Saturday night with our local Community Officers as a "Community Council" representative in our town (popn 20,000), aka unpaid volunteer as per article. In Scotland, the community police are real police officers and are used for city centre crime and so on. They are not armed and many police officers here do not want to be armed. The PC I was with said the best weapon he had was his voice.
Whilst I was with them, it was mostly drunken & disordly, one drugs offence, kids (less than 16yrs) with cider and buckfast, pissing in the street type of arrests that are very common in the UK on a Saturday night. (note to North American readers: you have no idea how much of an alcohol nation the UK is, it makes "Spring Break" look like a vicars tea party))
Are we being asked to spy on neighbours? well, not really. They recently asked us to help identify some hoodlum who had been stealing satnavs out of cars but really, here, crime is very low and we don't get much more than that. They once asked the community to look out for some folks who were dumping industrial rubbish in the corner of the park - I imagine that some areas of England are a bit like the article describes, but not here in Scotland (which is still part of the UK, for the moment)
as another tech contractor who has worked in the past at 113DS, FR and GF - I know what you mean about getting dev access or access to one of the gigantic machine rooms. I would say that RBS core systems and its brands (natwest, coutts, Ulster(s)) are extremely secure to the point of not being able to do any work. Even the due process to make a change to a production system is amazing with full-time boards spending all day evaluating every change.
from what I read on finextra.com, it looks like this box was owned by a supplier firm and subsequently was stolen by an employee of the supplier firm and sold on ebay. Also, the box had not been used since 2005 - perhaps an old server in the cupboard (of the supplier Graphic data) that an employee thought they could sell on ebay. I am struggling to see how this would have happened as a badged RBS server at one of the EDI datacentres. They run a tight ship.
one thing for sure, Graphic Data can kiss goodbye to their contract with RBS - one thing I know abut RBS is that they are very worried about security breaches - especially public ones like this.
Criminally negligent is a very serious allegation you are making. I can not understate that.
it's easy. Europe, and member states have strict data protection laws, Best Western have broken more than one. Certainly, in the UK directors of a company are responsible for data protection and could be criminally responsible - although this has not been tested in court.
Also, I think Best Western will certainly be having uncomfortable discussions with their merchant acquirers because Best Western have not met the terms in the acquirer contract to appli PCI DSS (Credit card security standards)
Certainly, I've worked in a few large organisations that have had to encrypt credit card data in databases so that members of staff may not see the data. if Best Western had done this, then the data would have been a bit more secure.
legality is an issue - why should *you* make the judgement on whether that data is in fact stolen - perhaps that data has been placed their by banking regulators/NHTCU using 'honeypot' card numbers so that tracing can occur to recover funds.
A well known Scottish bank (that I used to work at) were well known for chasing money launderers who have (ab)used their systems to the ends of the earth - often spending more than the consequential fraud loss to do so. In the old days, they used to use marked cheques - nowadays they have hotscan products that will trace payments to affiliated payment networks across international borders.
Yeah, breaking into phishing sites is a lot of fun, but before you "drop table", think about your actions and whether you are breaking the computer misuse act (UK) or the Police and Justice Act (Scotland) or indeed any law from the host nation.
The Gary MacKinnon case has shown that a rather underrated cracker (poking around with Term Services looking for blank passwds -- for FS!) can cause an extradition to a foreign country well known for its human rights abuses - is just shocking.
I'm in the same boat - but am going for an Acer Aspire One (on sale now) and will be using a Huawei E220 3G net access dongle thing before the GSM/3G card comes out. I use this every day with an X41 and it works well...
Slashdot Mirror
sorry for ruining the dodgy analogy, but in the UK FMCG market (fast moving consumer goods), brands do pay the supermarkets for premium shelf space - and they will pay varying amounts depending on whether the goods are at eyeline etc. the problem with brand push economics is that it is not transparent to the public and will end up in some sort of sleazy monopolistic situation where some providers are being given preferential treatment over others no matter what is being paid.
&£; doesn't work though!
We're just waiting now for the sales to drop off (or the phone lines to be swamped) as our business to business customers get their browsers upgraded and don't buy online from us. We've got $m's worth of projects on the go to replace the platform but the business feels it has been strongarmed into replacing the platform with a like for like replacement with no business advantage.i.e. they are set back 2 years to get to the same place we are at now.
In a way, this is a blessing in disguise because MS is never going to be selling enterprise solutions (beyond file & print) here again and now open source is certainly not frowned upon and is a real contender for big enterprise systems. It's certainly not fluff - This organisation deals with a quarter of the population of UK and employes 10's of thousands of people.
it's a pity that dd-wrt etc don't allow the renaming of the root account... That would make this attack vector a whole lot harder.
It used to have hilarious consequences as AI cars behind the spinning-out-of-control AI car would crash into it, deflecting and causing a complete pile up.
This gameplay felt realistic because this is what happens when cars are travelling at high speed in close formation.
Newer versions of Gran Turismo on the Playstation 3 - have way more computation cycles and so the AI cars now drive a whole lot better and never seem to crash. Sure they take different lines into corners and so on - but they don't completely bollox it up like the human drivers often do. It has made the game pretty infuriating because it has taken a randomness factor out of the game.
Personal PIN Number
what, a Personal Personal Identification Number Number?
do you think the car at 7'oclock on the big corner was parked without applying the handbrake? it looks like it has rolled backwards down the hill.
say your sole data provider is credit card payment system, or a database or whatever. The key is that if you wrap a data service round that source - and you map out business services such as:
Then if you get fed up with the provider of the credit card system then you have the chance to change suppliers without regression testing or rewriting any of the clients. Of course, it also works the other way around. Because you have a tightly defined *business* interface then you can add clients without having to regression test all the others and the backend system.
Clearly, you get the biggest benefit if you are a large organisation - the org I work at has 12m customers and 3500 staff with a history of many expensive silo'ed systems - so the systems are complex and varied. We have an SOA culture thats trangressed the crappy buzzwords and sales crap from IBM et al. Anyone who knows their stuff about enterprise IT should be doing this already.
sorry to post after my own post, but I just found the source - it was £60m, not £26 - I heard 26m on a gartner call last year! here is a link to tharticle in Computing Magazine
rubbish - SOA is not just about technology - it is the ability to design business services that relate to the business objectives and processes of an organisation. Organisations that try to produce SOA by starting with technology are doomed to failure!
The trick is to implement services into various layers ranging from business to technology fucuses so that maximum orchestration and thus allows reuse to occur.
Some organisations use mainstream Enterprise Service Buses (ESB) that provide communication protocols (like web services, MQ, Tibco RV, even XML & HTTP), data mapping, orchestration and provide containers that support runtime contracts for services. Not all are OO, not all are Java - Intel even sell one implemented in hardware, quite a few are open source - and this is where open source is a much more convincing argument for large blue chip orgs - especially those who have been driven into WebLogic, .NET, Websphere technology cul-de-sacs in the past...
One Scottish assurer claims to be saving £26m a year - we're not quite saving that much yet - but our enterprise SOA is showing massive savings in producing back office systems for our call centres and admin & processing.
I'd recommend reading any of Thomas Erl's books.
how can they prove that the email address in the file wasn't placed there by someone else?
I don't think that would last long as evidence in court, especially if some bright spark changes the email in the tag to steve.jobs@apple.com
anyone know if it was Z2K-like?
I found the extensions very useful: I used a slightly modified LDAP Extension to integrate with the MS Active Directory used here (in a non-standard way).
yes looked at some commercial wikis (like confluence) and J2EE based options. A big plus for mediawiki is that most users are familiar with wikipedia even if they haven't ever contributed to it. For thos evaluating, I found wikimatrix a useful place to start - although, paper exercises are no subsitute to trying the stuff out.
I was in the market for a wiki engine for a top-100 UK company. It seemed, during the investigation phase, that twiki was too good to be true - until we found that the founder and main contributor polluted just about every forum with "use twiki" messages whether it was sensible or not. It met our shortlist and so we installed it, but, it didn't meet our criteria on usability, administration and we found it to be quite slow. I think the 'founder' had raised expectations a little too high on all those forums he posted to...
Certainly, we now have an open source policy that looks into the organisation of the hosting project to look out for these sorts of shenanigans before we use it. Certainly, I think the twiki situation is more about the personality of the 'founder' than anything and I would steer clear of a project that is behaving like this until the project board are more stabilised. it's happened before, and it will happen again.
We went with mediawiki and its been a real success and culture changing event for the organisation - encouraging some of the staff to send in fixes and create extensions to be shared with the community. The success of mediawiki software and the mediawiki project as a whole has now opened up the discussion on Linux, JBoss and other open source platforms in this once closed-source-only organisation.
My advice is to evaluate the merits of your software shortlist on EQUAL basis. Get your decision makers to agree criteria for the selection of software BEFORE starting your evaluation and then choose the best scientifically. Factor in initial capital spend, running costs, feature-match and roadmap. The best software might not always be OSS although I've found many OSS and quasi OSS to have a very compelling business cases.
In case you are interested (in various contracts), The following have been the ones I've seen the most:
What I'm not really seeing in my customers even though I'd really like to:
One of my recent customers has a big investment problem with their VB6/IIS5.0 platform - they have invested 2 or so million GBP (double that for USDollars) and find themselves unable to upgrade to .NET now that MS platform has gone "out of support" this is due to the poorly architected platform and in part their poor use of the platform - it is these contracts where OSS is winning (OSS Java Enterprise and some are looking at LAMP) because clients are ultra sensitive about commercial lock in...
I use the Trekstor Vibez that has the benefit of being linux compatible, works beautifully with OGG (all my tunes are Ogg) and also is based on the Sigmatel chipset that is a later version of the popular Rio hardware - so has true gapless playback, Rio DJ and proper sound profiling.
sadly, if you've been reading the news over the last few weeks you'd have noticed that the Europeans are very much paying for the USA's last decade of blatent over-spending. Many of the Euro governments have had to sink billions of euros into propping up financial organisations that have had exposure to USA bad debt. Unfortunately, the financial markets are so closely linked that this opulence has now caused a debt-domino effect and spread throughout the world.
Also, some economists would say that because crude oil is priced in US$; that has allowed the USA government to be able to operate at a massive national debt level since the 70's.
It's worthwhile standing back from it all and just accepting that neither of the systems is right or wrong. Just a little different.
Paypal acts like a payment processor, not a bank. They don't have a bank charter among other things. ...
Yes they do, the UK FSA forced them to become a money issuer in 2004 and to escape FSA ruling in 2007 they managed to get a banking license issued by the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF) in Luxembourg - under the name eBay SA. The European Paypal HQ is therefore now in Luxemburg.
The problem with this is that Luxemburg has well known lax regulations for banking and is a well known tax haven - that has seriously pissed off the German government for harbouring criminals and tax evaders. Also, they have strict banking secrecy laws so that Paypal can operate autonomously reporting to no-one.
The Business are "supposed to be" experts in deriavitives, swaps, banking, finance or whatever and they ellucidate requirements to the IT folks who concentrate on building the systems. In smaller firms, or tech based companies, this distinction rarely exists.
There is always a degree of tension between the two departments because the IT folk think the business are stupid (because the IT folks generally become more expert at the financial business than The Business) and The Business believe the IT crowd to be slow, expensive and pedantic.
its because IT folks do not communicate the degree of difficulty that non-functional requirements are to deliver - because we think that The business are too stupid to understand.
also, in finance, it is The Business that get the big bonuses and on more than one occasion, I have heard business units say "They built the systems" when all they did is deliver a sub-standard list of untested requirements and manage some ill thought out user acceptance testing.
funnily enough, I was out as an observer on Saturday night with our local Community Officers as a "Community Council" representative in our town (popn 20,000), aka unpaid volunteer as per article. In Scotland, the community police are real police officers and are used for city centre crime and so on. They are not armed and many police officers here do not want to be armed. The PC I was with said the best weapon he had was his voice.
Whilst I was with them, it was mostly drunken & disordly, one drugs offence, kids (less than 16yrs) with cider and buckfast, pissing in the street type of arrests that are very common in the UK on a Saturday night. (note to North American readers: you have no idea how much of an alcohol nation the UK is, it makes "Spring Break" look like a vicars tea party))
Are we being asked to spy on neighbours? well, not really. They recently asked us to help identify some hoodlum who had been stealing satnavs out of cars but really, here, crime is very low and we don't get much more than that. They once asked the community to look out for some folks who were dumping industrial rubbish in the corner of the park - I imagine that some areas of England are a bit like the article describes, but not here in Scotland (which is still part of the UK, for the moment)
as another tech contractor who has worked in the past at 113DS, FR and GF - I know what you mean about getting dev access or access to one of the gigantic machine rooms. I would say that RBS core systems and its brands (natwest, coutts, Ulster(s)) are extremely secure to the point of not being able to do any work. Even the due process to make a change to a production system is amazing with full-time boards spending all day evaluating every change.
from what I read on finextra.com, it looks like this box was owned by a supplier firm and subsequently was stolen by an employee of the supplier firm and sold on ebay. Also, the box had not been used since 2005 - perhaps an old server in the cupboard (of the supplier Graphic data) that an employee thought they could sell on ebay. I am struggling to see how this would have happened as a badged RBS server at one of the EDI datacentres. They run a tight ship.
one thing for sure, Graphic Data can kiss goodbye to their contract with RBS - one thing I know abut RBS is that they are very worried about security breaches - especially public ones like this.
Criminally negligent is a very serious allegation you are making . I can not understate that.
it's easy. Europe, and member states have strict data protection laws, Best Western have broken more than one. Certainly, in the UK directors of a company are responsible for data protection and could be criminally responsible - although this has not been tested in court.
Also, I think Best Western will certainly be having uncomfortable discussions with their merchant acquirers because Best Western have not met the terms in the acquirer contract to appli PCI DSS (Credit card security standards)
Certainly, I've worked in a few large organisations that have had to encrypt credit card data in databases so that members of staff may not see the data. if Best Western had done this, then the data would have been a bit more secure.
and the past ski season in Scotland (Jan-Apr 2008) - saw our western resorts, Glencoe and Aonach Mor with some of the best snow seen for 10 years.
legality is an issue - why should *you* make the judgement on whether that data is in fact stolen - perhaps that data has been placed their by banking regulators/NHTCU using 'honeypot' card numbers so that tracing can occur to recover funds.
A well known Scottish bank (that I used to work at) were well known for chasing money launderers who have (ab)used their systems to the ends of the earth - often spending more than the consequential fraud loss to do so. In the old days, they used to use marked cheques - nowadays they have hotscan products that will trace payments to affiliated payment networks across international borders.
Yeah, breaking into phishing sites is a lot of fun, but before you "drop table", think about your actions and whether you are breaking the computer misuse act (UK) or the Police and Justice Act (Scotland) or indeed any law from the host nation.
The Gary MacKinnon case has shown that a rather underrated cracker (poking around with Term Services looking for blank passwds -- for FS!) can cause an extradition to a foreign country well known for its human rights abuses - is just shocking.
I'm in the same boat - but am going for an Acer Aspire One (on sale now) and will be using a Huawei E220 3G net access dongle thing before the GSM/3G card comes out. I use this every day with an X41 and it works well...