In a recent expansion of Telecity’s datacentres to Powergate in North London they used Geo to provide fibre through the sewers. Given that one of COLT’s major hubs is located in Powergate one wonders if Telecity made use of COLT fibre as well as Geo.
Guru
Much trumpeting is made about the UK Government £2000 car scrappage. Like most of the pronouncements from this government it should not be taken at face value.
The amount is split in two amounts of £1000 between the manufacturer and the Government, but each amount includes VAT at 15% so £300 of the amount goes straight back to the Government. The initial net cost to the Government is £700, not the much trumpeted £2000.
Now let’s remember that a car selling for £10,000 will include a VAT amount of £1,500. So the scheme by the government to get people who wouldn’t have bought a new car anyway will give the government a net £800 gain in taxation per car included in the scheme. Not a lot of generosity there!
Alaric
The poor performance of the Royal Mail is so bad it is almost fraudulent. They have halved local deliveries, they have halved local collections. The number of Post Offices in the area has almost halved, causing longer queues for customers. Yet they have increased their prices well above inflation in the past few years. Their “First Class Large envelope” scheme is another money raking scheme. They treat their staff so poorly there are frequent strikes.
All this decreased service level just transfers the cost to the customers. A classic MBA type solution where a monopoly is involved.
This morning they couldn’t deliver a small packet, because I was out (there is no way of predicting when the mail will be delivered). So they just posted a “come and collect card” through the door. Both my adjacent neighbours were in at the time, but the Royal Mail chose the solution most convenient for themselves and most inconvenient to me. Now I have a 30 minute round trip to the sorting office. To rub salt into the wounds they included my neighbours mail in with the letters that were pushed through my door. So I had to deliver the mail for the Royal Mail!!
The current Royal Mail bosses should be fired! Their cost to the business infrastructure is unbearable.
Alaric
Oaksys Tech Ltd has been in operation for over 10 years and we place great emphasis on good customer relations. Going that extra mile is important. Imagine our surprise when we discover the situation with a new supplier of printing services to ourselves. We ordered a batch of USB memory sticks to be printed for marketing purposes by this “new” company.
First they demand payment up front, because they have not dealt with us before. Understandable, but an irritant and a bit one sided.
Then they can’t handle the artwork which has been used by other printing companies, because they don’t handle pdf format files. We have to fork out an extra £25 for the file to be converted by them. They are starting to test our patience.
When we placed the order, we mentioned that there was no rush because we will not be using the product before 1st Oct 2009. We sent a cheque for the full amount 16 days ago. Since then radio-silence from the printer. Knowing that typically such a job takes about 4 weeks with previous printers we sent an email enquiring about their estimated delivery date.
You’ve guessed it already - they are planning to deliver on 1st of October 2009, some 10 weeks after the date of order. These people must either be extremely busy or have some weird scheduling process. I’ve checked with other printers and they have told me that once the artwork was available it would be only 30 minutes work maximum to print the USB memory sticks.
What really irks me is the lack of communication from this printing company. In these days of email it is inexcusable. It would have cost them nothing to send an email saying - “thanks for your order … this is when we intend to deliver …” How do they stay in business if they treat their new customers so poorly. I don’t think that they will see any repeat business from us.
Guru
Here’s an interesting perpective on Cloud Computing.In the UK will we see Data Centres constructed in the mountain area’s to take advantage of lower temperatures? Will the geeks get to live and work in the highlands and moorlands?Guru
As currently configured it is the Bank of England’s attempt to “print money” by buying UK debt back from investors, including foreign investors. Buying debt from the foreign investor does not inject value into our economy, it merely devalues the pound.
A far more effective way of injecting the money into the UK economy would be to send every man women and child in the UK a cheque for the amount of £2080 each to let them spend/save it. It would be the same cost as the Bank’s current plan.
Guru
My publisher wrote by email to the Local Authority of Southwark offering them a free copy of my new book for each of their libraries. That was over a week ago and there has been no response of any kind. My publisher phoned today to find the name of the person he should write to, given that the contact email address on their public website seemed to be unmonitored. After 35 minutes on the phone, they were finally able to find the name of the person who deals with such matters.
My publisher forwarded the original email to the newly discovered email address. Sure enough 5 minutes later an out of office response was received saying that the person addressed in the email was away for 20 days. I wonder what will happen when that person returns? There will be a massive outstanding email stack to be dealt with by the person.
I don’t think that my publisher will waste any more time on this local authority.
Alaric
I’ve just had a Sales guy on the phone. He sounded desperate, as though he was calling all of the contacts in his CRM system in the hope of finding potential business. Strangely enough I was looking at another site in the USA last week who say this is precisely what you should not do if you want to make sales.
This sales guy was making some classic mistakes:
In short he convinced me that he was a lightweight sales person whose job was under threat. I deal with very wealthy clients who put a great deal of store in the integrity of their suppliers. I would not expose my clients to this person, even indirectly.
Alaric
I recently had to deal with a situation where a friend was trying to maintain his on-line shop, or what is now called e-commerce. He was using a service supplier to provide these facilities (SaaS software as a service). His problem was that when he tried to maintain the records for the shop, such as products or product stock levels he was finding that he had to constantly re-enter his login authentication details. The timing of this was not predictable it was in effect erratic. It could be mid-transaction or when swapping between screens.
A more alarming symptom of this problem was that when he logged into his shop as a test client he encountered the same problem. Shoppers who had to repeatedly log in to enter an order would soon lose faith and go find another supplier. It would be unlikely that the shop owner would know the cause.
The technical support team for the on-line shop were baffled. So far as they were concerned the system was working fine. I put my detective’s hat on and set to work. When I tried the system from my office and from my home there were no problems. When I tried it from my friend’s computer the problems returned. It was not browser linked; nor was it the firewall on the PC. After a while inspiration struck and I checked out his external firewall/router. I found that his firewall was set to load balance across two internet connection lines. If I turned off one external line the problem disappeared, in a repeatable fashion. My deduction was that the host software of the e-commerce system must be tracking the IP address of the remote user. When the IP address changed, under load balancing across two ports, the system considered that the remote user was not properly authenticated.
Small business users and consumers don’t often use dual internet line load balancing, but this is likely to become increasingly common as businesses increasingly depend on their network connection.
The service provider should have tested for this type of user configuration and made sure that their logic allowed for that to happen. The problem appears to be handled by the on-line banking and other large e-commerce systems without too much effort. After all the whole point about the Internet protocol is that data paths can be diversely routed. Clearly the testing environment of the supplier needs some enhancement.
Guru