Posts by steven W. Scott

Yup

you don't exist either. I need no proof.

Rejoice Peasants!

Verily, that which causeth our exile from Eden now blesses our bosoms with perfectification of language! Cast thy evil Java and C/C++ from thy houses, and stand with thy master Apple in righteousness! Let the Trinity of P's (Python/Perl/PHP) be cast down as derision!

*...(dry hacking cough from third pew)...*

Yeah, indeed, cast thy Google and Windows transgressions into the fire, lest they cause you more sin. The language of thy master Apple shall fall like coins, shimmering gold in the light, falling from thy wallet wherever ye may be found, so all may know ye as the people of thy master Apple. Rejoice indeed!

*... (Choir sings hymn "Bringing in the Sheep")...*

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

You Cretin Pigs!

Why would you exploit a Windows oversight just to keep running.... *.gasp.* FREE SOFTWARE!!!!!!

Barbarians!!!!

conclusion:

a cloud is mostly formed by hot air

Linkedin: A wasteland of recruiters and embelishment

Deleted my Linkedin acct nearly three years ago - for some strange reason tho, my password still found its way into the hacked list released 6-8 months ago. During the time my account was active (5 years or so) it provided no value to me whatsoever, unless value could be attributed to receiving solicitations for employment in some foreign country at laughable pay.

Content is king on the web, and if the substance of the content is questionable or lacking completely (ie, The CEO of multimillion dollar business "Informationen Technologie-Design" is actually a distant cousin living on welfare), then the visitors aren't returning, and besides, a hiring manager will still want an interview or some more concrete method of evaluating a prospect for employment consideration than a self-evaluation from a social site. Geocities anyone?

Finally

.....an earth friendly way to charge my flying car the prophets told me about in 1973

Hi, my name is Bob, and I am a data processing programmer

The primary goals set forth in the boardrooms of the 80's were: reduce the cost of techies, and shed the long-term employees to reduce retirement benefit liabilities. Since I entered the IT arena in 1981, I have been shown the door roughly every 10 years either due to buyouts, outsourcing, or downsizing. During this time IT shops methodically moved from creative development shops - which incidentally, requires more expertise and therefore, expense - to operations and maintenance type shops, with the effort concentrated on installing, configuring and operating pre-built vendor software as the legacy in-house systems were retired. As those systems were retired, so too were the old-timers who built them.

So now most IT jobs seek merely tools for tools, and the IT execs have traded dependency on certain key IT employees to dependency on some 3rd party vendor's sale and support force, a definite loss of control when attempting to match business requirements to the capabilities of the existing software, and while the average salary may be lower, the number of employees required has increased due to the care, feeding, and burping that most IT software products require.

It's kind of fitting that they are now beholden to the same sort of dollar squeezers they have been. Hope they enjoy the ride!

But...

if they didn't dick around, they wouldn't be engineers now, would they?

Canonical EOL on my unit

Canonical continues to move further and further away from it's Debian base, if for no other reason than to be different. I cant stand what they did with runlevels and startup, and the new UI SUCKS. What, we're supposed to remember all the names and functions of our installed apps by icons? Isn't that how the Chinese alphabet got started?

WTF is with these vendors who think a PC that works like a phone is going to be sooooo badass? I write code. I create media. I custom build software packages. I want a command line, not some flashy, inaccurate and poorly responsive touch panel to sooth dull minds.

I still haven't upgraded my Lucid 10.04 laptop, but when I do, I can assuredly say it will not be a Canonical distro. Debian makes a pretty nice desktop these days, and I've been thinking about giving Slackware a spin.

One desktop to rule them all, eh? Good luck with that. What's that proverb.... something about eggs in one basket....

1 point in Horseshoes

Huge untapped market, but methinks few will choose to cloud their data.

Spider Sense,.... tingling......

Danger of BS very near.....

When I pop in or out of TOR, and also at times on my mobile, FB creeps out and drops into "suspicious hacking" mode. My guess is +1 to "hack attempts" every time someone's IP addr changes while actively logged in to FB. I could see how that would run up the tab, but it's fairly meaningless.

GPS is a bit invasive, but....

you IP alone already provides enough to pinpoint you pretty close to home

Not everybody needs a locomotive

Beauty chip. It all comes down to how much data you need to move, and nothing moves data like a mainframe.

Um, ...... yeah.

Cant see how their inept marketeers and sleazy weasel service managers can pump the public sector more, & private sector prospects are pretty tight these days and for the foreseeable future. Baghdad Bob award?

old is new!

I have received a vision.... .workload management! :o

I wish I was linux, I wish I was linux, I wish I was linux....

Even though they seem to finally be grasping the benefit and competitive advantages of a modular architecture, I can't imagine MS will ever eliminate the precluding dependencies without ultimately compounding it and obfuscating the architecture, if only to prevent the possibility that a third party may develop a much more efficient and reliable modular component.

The "memory game" workaround is most concerning, and I can only deduce that memory creep will again be a major issue with Win7, not to mention the remote possibility of disastrous results as program A, which would normally crash on access to previously unallocated memory, now obtains whatever value may have been there and uses it as, say, a disk write address. One never knows whether that bit of code that didn't get executed before is OK to run now with "assistance". If the developer is unable to properly manage memory, it is quite reasonable to expect that there may be other issues within the code. It appears to me that attempting to make an app more reliable has the potential to make the OS less reliable.

Still, appreciate very much Mark's straightforwardness. Perhaps this is a new era for Microsoft.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

Yes, we have a pristine, camera friendly "data center" with latest and greatest racking, overhead cabling, and environmental controls chock full of high density blades. And then there's the rest of the data center, which occupies the other 2 thirds of the building; a hodgepodge of Fuji, Solaris, Z-series, ATLs, SAN arrays, under-tile mish-mash of cables , Wintel farm, P690 AIX boxes, tape devices and networking equipment, all of which handle the lions share of the processing that occurs.

The REAL fraud is...

Climate change itself. Show me a world without climate change and I'll show you a dead planet. Morons.

People, droids, PCs and delusions #3

Here, Here! And let us not forget the software vendors who prey on the misconceptions and confusion, pushing suite solutions which might only provide one or two high quality point solutions and the rest is mediocre fluff which doesn't integrate well with existing systems, or not at all. Buy one product to make you SOA, another and you've got ITIL! Is there no end to the madness?

Or.........

40,000 virtual ZLinux systems running under ZVM on one Zseries box. Power issue solved.

You'd prefer science as religion?

Like most religious zealots, you make your case with the assumption that all you claim is indeed proven. Is it still not the "Theory of Evolution"? Certainly there are precepts of Darwin's theory that have validity, and others that do not, or have not yet been verified scientifically.

A particular species which grows larger and stronger due to an abundant and high quality food source in it's environment is not at conflict here, it's the concept that a particular species, confronted with a particular challenge, suddenly begins some quasi-conscious self modification to meet that challenge (grow legs, wings, etc..), as if a dog breeder can eventually "evolve" a long-necked dog by placing it's and it's progeny's food bowl at an unnaturally high position relative to the dog. Absurd.

That, combined with a complete dismissal of any other possible explanation for diversity in species, including that of creationism, is where your religion of science begins. Science questions everything, including it's own probable conclusions.

Been there, done that.

It's called "re-entrant" code. Had your boffins spent any time in the big iron mainframe world you'd know it's been in place since the mid 70's. Why is it that the micro-heads always think they've come up with something new when it's been in place for over a quarter century in the mainframe world?

Ditto for workload management. Cutting edge in the micro world, but old-hat on the mainframes.

It's a shame that the cultural and "religious" differences between mainframers and micro-heads prevents building upon previous knowledge like you normally see in any other scientific discipline. Tsk, Tsk.......

What the chicken farmers don't say.....

What I've noticed is that whenever someone attempts to sell you on the idea that 1000 chickens is better than 1 ox to pull your load, they never mention the fact that it takes a considerably larger enclosure and power to house 1000 chickens, whereas the OX only takes up one stall and eats far less.

I've seen the p690s come in and the blades in a shop which is primarily z/series based - we're now out of both space and power due to the exorbant infrastructure requirements created by these "modern" platforms.

Sad thing is, they could be running 10,000 virtual linux "chickens" on the z/series box, and save a hell of a lot of money.

Science=Religion?

It's truly disturbing when the science community begins distorting evidence and ignoring facts to support their premise, namely that man is responsible for global warming. What about:

* - The sun is warmer .. and all of these scientists don't seem to be willing to credit a warmer sun with any of the blame for global warming.

* - The polar ice caps on Mars are melting. How did our CO2 emissions get all the way to Mars?

* - It was warmer in the 1930s across the globe than it is right now.

* - It wasn't all that long ago that these very same scientists were warning us about "global cooling" and another approaching ice age.

* - How much has the earth warmed up in the last 100 years? One degree. Now that's frightening.

* - That famous "hockey stick" graph that purports to show a sudden warming of the earth in the last few decades is a fraud. It ignored previous warming periods ... left them off the graph altogether.

* - The Kyoto accords exempt some of the world's biggest CO2 polluters, including China and India.

* - Many of these scientists who are sounding the global warming scare depend on grant money for their livelihood, and they know the grant money dries up when they stop preaching the global warming sermon.

* - Global warming "activists" and scientists seek to punish those who have different viewpoints. If you are sure of your science you have no need to shout down or seek to punish those who disagree.

* - What happened to the Medieval Warm Period? In 1996 the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a chart showing climatic change over a period of 1000 years. This graph showed a Medieval warming period in which global temperatures were higher than they are today. In 2001 the IPCC issued another 1000 year graph in which the Medieval warming period was missing. Why?

* - Why has one scientist promoting the cause of man-made global warming been quoted as saying "we have to get rid of the medieval warming period?"

* - Why is the ice cap on the Antarctic getting thicker if the earth is getting warmer?

* - In the United State, the one country with the most accurate temperature measuring and reporting records, temperatures have risen by 0.3 degrees centigrade over the past 100 years. The UN estimate is twice that.

* - There are about 160,000 glaciers around the world. Most have never been visited or measured by man. The great majority of these glaciers are growing, not melting.

* - Side-looking radar interferometry shows that the ice mass in the West Antarctic is growing at a rate of over 26 gigatons a year. This reverses a melting trend that had persisted for the previous 6,000 years.

* - The sea levels have been rising since the last ice age ended. That was 12,000 years ago. Estimates are that in that time the sea level has risen by over 300 feet. The rise in our sea levels has been going on long before man started creating anything but natural CO2 emissions.

* - Like Antarctica, the interior of Greenland is gaining ice mass.

* - Over the past 3,000 years there have been five different extended periods when the earth was measurably warmer than it is today.

* - During the last 20 years -- a period of the highest carbon dioxide levels -- global temperatures have actually decreased. That's right ... decreased.

* - Why did a reporter from National Public Radio refuse to interview David Deming, an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma studying global warming, after his testimony to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee unless Deming would state that global warming was being caused by man?

* - Why are global warming proponents insisting that the matter is settled and that no further scientific research is needed? Why are they afraid of additional information?

* -On July 24, 1974 Time Magazine published an article entitled "Another Ice Age?" Here's the first paragraph:

"As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age."

* - Why do nearly ALL meterologists discredit man-made global warming and immediately refer to the sun's increased output?

Sloppy application programmers......

Just another case of sloppy app programmers..."Length and Error checking? The system takes care of that while I can concentrate on my beautiful code!".....

1 Oxen or 1000 beavers?

Nice to see people are starting to realize that those "nasty old mainframes" aren't so bad after all. It's really amazing how over the years the Wintel/Solaris marketeers have cast such an impression of leprosy on large-scale, mainframe business systems, when the truth of the matter is that each platform has it's own unique strengths, and when properly exploited, compliment each other with suprisingly positive results. Even more prevalent than IMS, CICS(Customer Information Control System), or Transaction Server as it is now called, is widely used in Government, Hospitals, and the privates sector as it is probably the most robust and reliable transaction processor currently availble, however, it's shortcoming is it's user interface, primarily 3270 green screen but IBM added web capabilities 15 years ago, yet nonetheless it is still clunky and cumbersome to develop green screens or web pages underneath. What has resulted is the trend of using of MQ as the SOA "service bus" for application components on the various platforms is growing, as it makes it relatively easy to leverage disparate systems and architectures into a unified, effective and efficient solution. After all, The beavers do a great job of felling the trees, but you're going to want the Ox to pull the wagon.