Month: October 2013

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After being chastised for too much techno-drivel I choose current events for $800.

I’m not sure what to write about…

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How about the 160,000 people that will be losing, or have lost their insurance in California due to the implementation of Obamacare? Yes, Yes, I know it’s actually called ACA now that  The President is trying to distance himself from the controversy.

I note that he called it Obamacare in at least one speech…

Of course that was when he was still telling us all that we’d get to keep our current healthcare coverage. That was when he was trying to be a salesman instead of The President.

How about the controversy over the Governments website? Or the fact that there are so many out of work QA people like myself who’d have loved to have jobs testing the code.

Oh, right! The government was so sure that their code was perfect they didn’t bother to test it until the last two weeks before going live.

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I suppose I could comment on the hearings about the website, and that the insanity you’re hearing or reading about is totally normal in almost ANY government contract. 

No one in government has a good idea about what the “Current” technology looks like.

The government tends to write contracts such that even if you have a better idea, or more current technology that is faster, cheaper, and works better, you can’t implement it.

Why???? Oh my dear boy… it’s because the contract can’t be changed without a review and the review will take at least 6 months and have to be voted on by some committee or possibly even Congress.

So this means that HTML ver 2.0 was used instead of the later version that is better, faster, and potentially more secure.

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Or that the CPU used in a particular piece of hardware that used to cost $20 when the contract was finalized, will cost $2020 in runs of 10,000 by the time the contract actually is completed.

The cost increase for the CPU is because the CPU is obsolete and now has to be custom manufactured.

It’s this kind of insanity that causes lots of companies to actively refuse government contracts.

Which inevitably leads to specialized government contractors who will do exactly what the contract says. Even when they know what the government has specified will not work.

After all why shouldn’t they?

There’s no real upside in suggesting changes to the contract.

In fact while the changes are under review the government won’t pay to keep employees assigned to the contract, this is called a stop work situation.

Then when the changes are approved the people that were working on the project are no longer available. Those people have been reassigned to other projects or they’ve been laid off and found employment elsewhere.

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The upside for these government contractors is reworking the project for years and billing the government to do it.

But boys and girls… this is the way things in Washington work and to some extent it’s a direct result of a government that is too big and bloated. For all the hand wringing and yelling in any of these hearings…

Nothing will change.

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I can’t resist…Yet MORE Techno-Drivel

Some of my friends are going to glaze over and possibly start bleeding from their ears and / or eyes.

Sorry

Yesterday was lost in a flurry of upgrades.

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some of you may be aware that Apple announced a number of new products yesterday, just in time for the Christmas shopping season.

Among the announcements were a couple of key things for me personally.

1) The delta between my current iPad mini and the new iPad mini isn’t great enough for me to begin lusting after a new iPad. Yes the retina display is nice and the processing horsepower might be handy but it’s not enough for me to chuck my iPad Mini in the bin.

2) Apple announced the release of their newest OS X called Mavericks and that it was FREE. Along with that announcement as that they were making their version of office suite applications free. As well as their iMovie, and Garage band applications.

Yipeee! I was downloading the stuff as soon as it became available.

Thus far this has been the absolute nicest OS upgrade I’ve ever done. Impressive as heck, and Mavericks runs just fine on a 5 year old MacBook Pro. Lets see you run Windows 8 on a 5 year old Dell.

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Oh and did I mention OSX is free? 

The systems upgraded perfectly, they were a bit slow at first mostly due to indexing and other stuff going on behind the scenes plus downloading application updates and housekeeping.

This morning the machines are their normal selves and fast as ever.

Pages, Numbers, and Keynote have all upgraded on my iPad, iPhone and on my computer too. Yes I still use the MS Office suite but for most things the Apple equivalents are just as good, read and write Office formats, and total cost is $60 instead of $200 or $300.

Some people in the news have called Apple a bit mean for their references to Microsoft during the announcements I personally think they weren’t mean. I think they were simply stating that the emperor’s got no clothes. 

I’m kind of hoping that Microsoft will take this as a challenge, or a red hot poker in the butt. I hope that they start concentrating on quality, and paying attention to what their customers want and need instead of the crap that seems to be coming out of focus groups.

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After all I do have to support clients running Windows. It would be far easier if Windows was stable and my clients liked it. As it is I’m supporting XP, Vista, Win 7 and Win 8 god help me.

Apple on the other hand is obviously trying to get all their users to the same OS and application versions. If they’re successful it will mean it will be a lot easier supporting their user base than having 4 or 5 variants in the field.

Another amazing number to me was the number of users that had upgraded to IOS7 in one month. It was something like 60% of their installed base. Dang! That speaks volumes and I have to admit I’m much happier since I drank the Apple Kool-aid and have a homogenous computing environment.

I think Apples catchphrase should be “Everything Just Works”

But then again…

I’m biased.

 

 

 

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Warning… This is techno-drivel…

Sorry to my non geek friends…Stop reading before your eyes start bleeding.

I noticed that Blackberry is releasing a version of the BBM (Blackberry messenger) for iPhone,  in 2008 it was a pretty neat application.

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I used it a lot but it was only really useful if your friends also had Blackberrys.

The practical upshot is that I had a grand total of about 10 people that I chatted with using the BBM service.

I’ll admit that there was a momentary “OH Cool” when I read that BBM was out on the iPhone.

Then I thought about it.

I can’t think of a single person in my circle of acquaintances that still uses any blackberry device. 

Wow! 

I really hadn’t thought about how long it had been since I’d even seen a Blackberry, other than the one sitting at the bottom of my sock drawer.

So at this late stage in the game, why the hell is Blackberry even bothering? The single advantage to BBM was that you didn’t use your carrier text messages. BBM used Blackberrys servers and your data plan instead of .20 text messages. 

Who doesn’t have unlimited texting these days?

BBM used to be top of the line.

A big disadvantage was that you couldn’t just reach out to anyone. They had to have a blackberry and you had to exchange a PIN number. On the one hand, this completely eliminated SPAM on the other hand the initial sync procedure was a pain in the ass.

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How is BBM any better than Apples messenger or simply normal text messages?

There are far more of my friends today that have iPhones. Apples Messenger works across iPad, iPhone, and the latest Mac OS X versions.

It’s simple, efficient, and just works. Messenger sends via your data plan if it knows the other device is something Apple. Your iPhone will select text messaging if the receiving device isn’t Apple. 

Had Blackberry continued to dominate the smartphone market and serve their business market, BBM on iPhone and Android today would be a welcome application.

However with the minuscule presence of Blackberry in smartphone market and the growing BYOD (Bring your own device) paradigm. I think the BBM application will suffer a fate similar to Blackberry’s formerly ubiquitous phones, obscurity and eventual irrelevance.

Sad really, when a great company slips and falls like Blackberry has.

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Have you heard about Widows 8.1???

Apple will be releasing OS X Mavericks shortly.

As I think about Windows and how poorly the latest versions have been received by the general public.

It occurred to me, if Apple wanted to drive a stake through windows heart (too much TrueBlood), they’d release their latest OS for $19.99 on any Intel platform.

Compared to the outrageous cost of Windows, I wonder how many people would simply say, “yeah I’m done with Windows” and pony up the $.

Perhaps that would be a more merciful death for Windows than “The Death of a thousand fuckups” it’s experiencing now. 

Nah… Apple won’t be that merciful to Microsoft.