I'm pretty sure the guy at the top was in on the ruse too.

By your comment, I'm pretty sure you've never worked a contract for government at a high level.

For a reality-based perspective, understand that silos are DEATH to most projects, and government structures are ALL SILOS. The fact that every single one of the "senior political figures" refused (make no mistake--it is always an active decision) is just par for the course.

So, how to change this? There are two key policies that must be implemented from the top:
1) The career of anyone who lies or fails to report bad news up the chain to those who need it is over, regardless of that person's position.
2) The reporting of bad news is to be treated as a problem to be solved, not an issue with the messenger (or the person who caused it).

Example: at a major metropolitan newspaper, a tech made a mistake and rm -rf * the website's home directory. He immediately reported it up the chain and the team dropped everything and worked on restoring the files. They then sat down and discussed how to mitigate the problem so that human error could not cause the same situation or how it could be restored quicker when it happened again. No retaliatory action was taken against the tech.

Every heard of Free Trade; e.g. NAFTA? Why should it only benefit American corporations?

No argument about CGI's incompetence. Seen it myself first-hand.

Cool it on the jingoism though.

Heh, I was referring to Project Management, as the "new line of work".

You're right though, I have about 8 outlook rules that make it very simple. I only really care about what 4 or 5 people have to say, the rest is just noise or done on a best effort basis.

When dealing with PMs I usually have one rule; one reply every four hours in an eight-hour shift, during one of my three e-mail checking windows.

Some people I reply at the end of the week, setting a delay to send the message at 5pm Friday when I know they have skipped work early.

If you don't have the skills to route my daily BS update somewhere more appropriate then your inbox maybe you should look for new line of work.

Project Management?

Seriously, one could make the argument that for a comprehensive communication skill-set, knowing who you should be engaging is as important as the actual message.

No, they used "sarcasm". The deadliest attack of them all.

Hm, /. may have a valid case to chase after.

After all, they duplicated the site/logo/etc without the permission of the actual copyright owners.

Hey, it could be your workplace next.

Um, I've been through enough M & As to know that businesses blow out all the time. I could care less, because it just means my commute and officemate wage slaves are going to change.

Whenever I get the memo that we're merging with someone else, that's when I start updating the resume and putting out feelers.

If I time it right, I can pick up the earlybird package before I leave for my next job, but if not, that's okay. The important thing is to get out before the water starts lapping at the Mezzanine deck, because that's when the panic sets in and the company starts prematurely pulling the trigger.

THEY WILL NOT SWITCH. Got to use what you like good for you.

Folks who live on the festering edge of technology will forever be in reactive mode.

They most likely live there because they don't know any better and have become "accustomed" to wearing their hair shirt.

There are a lot of customers of mine that love windows XP and there [sic] blackberrys.

Sure, and when Blackberry goes belly-up, they can suffer through a protracted outage while they scramble for a replacement. Nothing says success like a decision made in fear in panic. Or, they could start their planning and migration now and move as soon as they're ready.

Finally a use for tinfoil other than on my head: a GPS that cannot see the sky won't work. Or I could give it a nice coat of paint that has some aluminum powder mixed in. Or the wire powering the system could "wear out" by "rubbing" against another "moving part". ---- If they want to raise enough funds, all they have to do is eliminate all free curbside parking in the city. They don't even have to charge that much: $.25/hour will do it.

All freedom for me and none for thee. Some choice quotes from our idiot governor, Rick Perry:

Our view is that individuals and families can govern their lives better than bureaucrats.

Except when it comes to buying a car?

Conservatives are winning offices, and champions of big government are cleaning out their desks right now.

Since "convervatives" ARE "champions of big government", please clean out your desks and hit the road.

Americans want government that is leaner, more efficient, and less intrusive into their personal lives.

Yes, and that includes being able to test drive a car, you cretin.

In America, the people are not subjects of government, the government is subject to the people.

...but only Super People like PACs and Corps, right? Tiny Meat People don't count.

Whereas with a PC, Android or iOS system you have plenty of RAM, storage and graphics capability so you can be pretty sloppy in your code and get away with it.

Man, I don't have fond memories of memory/resource management in the old PC and C64 day. Not having to deal 64k blocks for expanded memory is a good thing.

In this day and age, multi-threaded programming is more important than managing memory IMHO. I've done my share of sloppy code, mostly because I had more important things to deal with. Sometimes a nested loop does the job quickly and you can move on to other parts. I have yet gotten a bonus,programming style points and won accolades from my peers by coding beautifully or super-efficiently. It's usually scorn and jealousy. 80% of the code I've worked on, no other soul looks at.

I say use what you have at hand and get the job done. If you got 2 Megs of RAM, use them. If you save the a Meg, you're not going to have some sort of cyber consciousness thank you for using less electricity or cycles. Hell, you may have limited your application by not using all the resources available to you.

If you have the luxury of time, enhance it and make it more bug-free.

While many good people lost their job in Nortel, there was a LOT of deadwood at Nortel. Kanata has never been the same since.

We had one upgrade with Nortel telecom equipment, where I had one engineer and five (or six) project managers. You need one or sometimes even two good project managers, but never FIVE, especially when the engineer is doing all the heavy lifting (figuratively and literally). So by charging us $300/hr, we knew we were subsidizing several crappy layers of ineffeciency.

A-L may in a similar boat. There are probably people who did not keep fresh or add very little value, because they were brought in when a VP went on an empire-building spree.

Good point.

Apple is setting a terrible precedent. I think I know their motivation (e.g. money, Chinese market, etc).

Let's say Saudi Arabia makes looking at dirty pictures illegal (not just immoral). Are they scrapping browsers?

No, the government needs to ensure that while using their network infrastructure the "dangerous" services and applications are blocked. Don't impose your morality and legality on citizens of other countries.

Apple is weak. They considered the cost/benefit analysis, and figured that the few hundred people who get irate about this won't matter. Chinese citizen will not stop buying an iPhone even with this app gone; they buy it for the "cool" factor not because it allows civil disobedience. Most Chinese are terrified of getting in the sights of their government. Those who have an iPhone will gladly use in the government-approved manner.

I once experienced an DoS MitM LTE XSS attack that lasted 42 hours and had a steady stream of 105TB/ms using NetBIOS Saturation over AppleTalk techniques that spread over a redundant cluster of MBR using HPFS. Of course the victim wishes to remain in the shadows as sharing the company's identity would either harm their reputation or allow you to verify the plausibility of the incident.