Posts by Chris Miller

Very good

Now offsite your data (and no-one better mention the c**** word).

@Nathan

It's true there are nearly 6,000 RFCs for IPv4 - that in itself might be a pretty good argument for moving to IPv6 - but 99% of them are either obsolete or relate to subprotocols that are so obscure that you're unlikely to have heard of them, let alone seen them in operation (I certainly haven't). It sounds like your beef is with the selection of defaults by manufacturers - which I agree is woeful, particularly in the domestic market where end users can't be expected to have much security awareness.

I'd love to see a "secure by design" set of protocols, can I get a "secure by design" operating system on which to run them, as well? I am reminded of the wise words of St Bruce of Schneier: "If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don't understand the problems and you don't understand the technology."

@oolon

Thanks for responding - I can, to some extent, see where you're coming from. Five-nines is equivalent to a second a day or 5 minutes a year, so we tend to measure it over a rolling 12-month period.

Availability is the only thing that counts to the business. It's a second order concern how reliable the hard drives are, as they're in a RAID configuration my systems are still available even if (when) one fails. I do monitor them, because I need to budget for replacement, but actually modern hard drives are very reliable with an MTBF measured in years. You may choose to believe that IBM have some secret sauce that they apply to make them even more reliable, but I believe they use the same heads and platters as everyone else, but put their own chips and connectors on them - partly to improve performance, but mainly to stop you using cheap plug-compatible parts for replacement or upgrade.

Every business should be asking itself, what level of availability does this application require? Five-nines is more than adequate for many typical apps (other factors, such as the application software itself, are likely to be significantly less reliable) - and for that level of availability a Wintel solution can suffice and be significantly more cost effective. This is the reason that there have been essentially zero new mainframe sales in the last decade, nearly all the purchases (which amount to several billions of dollars a year) have been for upgrades or replacements to increase performance or reduce maintenance and power consumption costs.

Why aren't they more popular?

The hardware is amazing (and thanks to TPM for another great article), but it's also amazingly expensive - to buy, maintain and support. In simplistic terms of bang for your buck, a Windows or Linux system is going to be an order of magnitude cheaper for all but the most gargantuan workloads.

These beasts still exist mainly because of all the large organisations that need to run millions of lines of legacy code that's either too expensive to convert or (more likely) impossible - since all the documentation has long since disappeared. I have this vision that in 2050 IBM will announce the zEnterprise 1960 to weak cheers from the dwindling band of 90-year-old Cobol programmers, the only people alive who can still support IMS and CICS.

"God sent us this 360 and lo, our 1400 payroll programs run no slower than before." The Devil's DP Dictionary (1981) - Stan Kelly-Bootle

Horses for courses

Quite so, I wouldn't recommend a Wyse/Citrix solution for users of CAD/CAM, Project or graphic designers. But for the 90% (?99%) who really just need Office and Internet access, the corporate benefits greatly outweigh the limitations, even of the rather clunky (compared with an iPad*, anyway) Wyse portable solutions.

* Citrix client now available for iPad, if your clients' tastes run that way.

You're both right (to an extent)

Disclaimer: I've never worked in the public sector, but my wife does.

While there are many skilled, dedicated and hard-working staff in the public sector, there are far too many skivers (9-to-5ers are much more common than in the private sector) and middle managers (private sector businesses have spent years flattening their management structure, but this has yet to be applied to the same extent in the public sector).

Wages for comparable jobs are broadly in line with the private sector (as would need to be the case to prevent everyone leaving and allow for recruitment to take place), but there are many for whom it's difficult to identify equivalent private sector work - e.g. planners and social workers.

@Santa - if you really think you can earn so much more in the private sector, why aren't you there? Is it because you:

[a] don't have the right skills;

[b] don't want to relocate; or

[c] get more job satisfaction in your current role?

Whichever it is, your continued presence suggests your salary is appropriate.

Depends on interpretation

A constructivist mathematician might take the view that you haven't actually identified an infinite number of primes (you can't show me a list containing them, or even a way of calculating them all) - only that they are unbounded, i.e. if you give me a prime number, I can always show you a larger one.

Physicists generally take the view that getting an infinite answer* demonstrates that there's something wrong with your theory.

* Black holes are where God divided by zero. - Steven Wright

@Trevor

Thanks - it's nice to get a considered reply. I absolutely agree that language should (indeed must) change over time, but I think its evolution along the lines of txtspk is unlikely because it's unnecessarily difficult to read (and ambiguous). I would like to think that in future our communications will not need to be limited to 140 characters.

I'm a huge fan of Ian (M) Banks, but my least favourite of his books is 'Feersum Endjinn', simply because it contains large sections written in phonetic English like that of the title, which also makes it unnecessarily hard to read (and contributes nothing to the storyline IMHO).

BTW the pre-1800 use of the long (medial or descending) 's' only resembles, but isn't, an 'f' - it survives as the integral sign in maths (analogous to the use of sigma to mean 'sum'). Final 's' and the second letter of a double 's' was written using the modern form of the letter, so successions would have resembled succefsions. The double 's' form led to the use in German typefaces of the sharp 's' (which resembles, but isn't, a Greek beta).

Once more, with feeling

Capitalism is not our moral compass - it's as silly to criticise a business for lacking altruism (which is how efros started this subthread) as it is to criticise a tiger for not being a vegetarian. Capitalism provides a framework within which it's possible for companies to provide goods and services without relying on their altruism, while leaving it open to individuals to choose whether to be altruistic or not. It is far from perfect and other systems are available, though many of them have been found to lead to the gulag or the gas chamber in fairly short order.

Perhaps we've taken the baker/bread analogy too far for an IT forum, but there's a widely-held belief that the nasty UK capitalists have turned our bread into shrink-wrapped, tasteless pap while our socialist cousins across the channel have retained their artisan bakers. Like many widely-held beliefs, this turns out to be a misconception.

When in France, I like nothing better than to pop in to the boulangerie for a tasty baguette. But after a few hours, it has turned into a rock-hard stick useful only for making brandade de morue. Not everyone has the time or the inclination to shop for bread every day, and where British-style shrink-wrapped sliced loaves are on offer to the French, they sell surprisingly well. (Sandwiches are one of M&S Paris best selling lines.) In the UK I can buy either the long-life stuff or fresh - more tasty, but doesn't last as long - it's called consumer choice.