I worked as an operator in the late 70s and it's not for nothing they called us tape jockeys. Imagine a bank with all its customer records on magnetic tapes. Feed in a tape with today's transactions and update the records on to another set of tapes. Make two copies of each tape and ship them off site. We spent most of the night copying tapes.
Posts by Chuunen Baka
76 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Dec 2010
You can never have too many backups. Also, you can never have too many backups
Not just deprecated, but deleted: Google finally strips File Transfer Protocol code from Chrome browser
Multiple customers knocked offline as firefighters tackle flames at Telstra's London Hosting Centre bit barn
Driveway karaoke singer who wanted to lift lockdown spirits cops council noise complaint
Das geeks hit crowdfunding target: IBM mainframes are coming home
Hipster whines at tech mag for using his pic to imply hipsters look the same, discovers pic was of an entirely different hipster
Why millions of Brits' mobile phones were knackered on Thursday: An expired Ericsson software certificate
Australia on the cusp of showing the world how to break encryption
Galileo, here we go again. My my, the Brits are gonna miss EU
Re: Fgs
The UK has become increasingly reliant on inward investment. Johnny Foreigner builds stuff here for, yes, a large internal market but also to export to Europe. That investment is stalling, multi-nationals are relocating to Euroland. Manufacturing is a global concern and will decline in an insular UK.
Slurp up patient data for algos that will detect cancer early, says UK PM
Productivity knocks: I've got 99 Slacks, but my work's not done
Interruptions
Of course it reduces productivity. Every context switch costs time and energy and Slack allows you to interrupt colleagues any time, anywhere. It doesn't help if people don't read emails because of too many automated emails from other productivity tools - I noticed someone with 3000 unread emails the other day. So people Slack rather than email so as not to be ignored.
For fanbois only? Face ID is turning punters off picking up an iPhone X
'We think autonomous coding is a very real thing' – GitHub CEO imagines a future without programmers
I've been coding for 40 years. When I started, everything was built from scratch. Now I glue open source libraries together. You still have to write reams of complex code but the relative increase in productivity is amazing. There are loads of user self-service products of varying qualities but there'll always be a role for specialised computer wranglers. Maybe not as many as now and definitely fewer doing low level coding.
The axeman strikes again: Microsoft has real commitment issues
Ten new tech terms I learnt this summer: Do you know them all?
UK government's war on e-cigs is over
Japan's terrifying techno-toilets will be made foreigner friendly, vow makers
Penetration tech: BAE Systems' new ammo for Our Boys and Girls
Gun-jumping French pols demand rapid end to English in EU
Lingua Franca
20 years ago if you went to a conference in Europe, you'd need translators for the French delegates but rarely for any others. Now conferences are conducted entirely in English and nobody seems uncomfortable with that. Virtually every well educated person in the world speaks some English. How many Asians or South Americans can speak any French?
Brits don't want their homes to be 'tech-tastic'
Google: 'Here to stay on business cloud... but a long way to go'
Ireland's international tech sector bumps up against language barrier
Are bearded blokes more sexist?
Why should you care about Google's AI winning a board game?
Aye, AI: Cambridge's Dr Sean Holden talks to El Reg about our robot overlords
How to save Wikipedia: Start paying editors ... or write for machines
Style over content
WP is effectively run by a bunch of people enforcing the manual of style. Experts are frozen out because every time there is a dispute, the old hands come down heavy spouting chapter and verse from thousands of pages in the talk: namespace. I used to do a lot of editing in a subject area that now has tumbleweed blowing through its talk pages. Most of the knowledgeable editors have been bullied out or just got plain fed up with the bad vibe.
Engineer's bosses gave him printout of his Yahoo IMs. Euro court says it's OK
Boozing is unsafe at ‘any level’, thunders chief UK.gov quack
Confused?
14 units/week = 1% risk of alcohol related death.
From the Beeb article http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35255384
"Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, an expert in understanding risk from the University of Cambridge, said it was important to put the 1% risk in context. He said an hour of TV watching or a bacon sandwich a couple of time a week was more dangerous."
What?
Assembly of tech giants convene to define future of computing
Wikipedia’s biggest scandal: Industrial-scale blackmail
Typewriters suck. Yet we're infinitely richer for those irritating machines
Accuracy
The main thing about using an old-fashioned typewriter is that it taught you accuracy. Mistakes were costly and even over-typing with Tipp-ex paper was still messy. And it didn't correct the CC.
And if you want a real challenge, try typing a long piece onto a duplicator stencil. Correcting those was a right pain.
Attack of the possibly-Nazi clone parakeet invaders
Google opens 'Inbox' heir-to-email trial to biz users
BT coughs £12.5 billion for EE as fourplay frolics pay off
Hawking and friends: Artificial Intelligence 'must do what we want it to do'
Vodafone: SPOOKS are plugged DIRECTLY into our network
Charity: Ta for the free Win 8.1, Microsoft – we'll use it to install Win 7
The cloud awaits... but is your enterprise ready for the jump?
Organic food: Pricey, not particularly healthy, won't save you from cancer
Steelie Neelie 'shocked' that EU tourists turn mobes off when abroad
Gay hero super-boffin Turing 'may have been murdered by MI5'
If you want an IT job you'll need more than a degree, say top techies
Amazon won't break into sweat about Google's cloud. Yet
First the Yanks, now us: In-flight mobe use WON'T kill us all, say Eurocrats
Thought you didn't need to show ID in the UK? Wrong
Thousands! of! Yahoo! Mail! users! driven! crazy! by! revamp!
Quantum computing gets recursive
Re: Useful?
"Two words: Grover's algorithm"
Wikipedia: "When applications of Grover's algorithm are considered, it should be emphasized that the database is not represented explicitly. Instead, an oracle is invoked to evaluate an item by its index. Reading a full data-base item by item and converting it into such a representation may take a lot longer than Grover's search. "
So it's still all to do with i/o unless someones working on a quantum database. Hey, your data's probably in here somewhere.
Useful?
Are these hypothetical devices only useful for number crunching? Most computing is actually data storage, retrieval, filtering and transforming. The clever stuff is still in the design of algorithms to acheive new things with the data. Obviously you can run an algorithm more times but the time-consuming part is usually all in the i/o. I don't see how quanta help with that.
I, for one, welcome our robotic communist jobless future
Bleak
I only see a dystopian future of a workless underclass controlled by robocops and drones. There will be a continuing erosion of human work while politicos bang on about "hard working families". Too many people and not enough jobs will push wages down so the plebs can't afford the bounty the robots produce.
The masses used to be useful as workers and consumers. They will be failing on both counts soon.