Posts by DB2DBA

Investor class

This is what passes for "investment" in the US today. Blow up the safe, grab the cash and let others repair the damage.

COBRA health insurance

As a note, COBRA is just a continuation of the employer's health care plan, but this coverage is not paid for by the employer. The full burden of cost is on the former employee, often hundreds of $ for the employee alone or well over $1000 per month for those with dependents.

Productivity loss?

Has anyone done a study of the actual cost to businesses due to a loss of productivity when they switched to W8 (aka Wait)? That is, of course, if any have...

Not enough

While it sounds like a lot of money, you would still pay out of pocket unless you have only one phone line. Generally, the cost to break your contract is $200 per line. If you have a family plan the charge is separate for each line in the plan. What is needed is for all providers to abolish contracts. AT&T's rollover minutes should be enough incentive to stay there. T-Mobile's lower cost is an incentive to others. Verizon's claim to nearly universal service is an incentive to those who need such coverage. (Obviously V would have to improve their game to keep customers based on previous remarks.) Sprint might need to bring back unlimited data to compete. Just offer people a reason to stay instead of handcuffs.

z

This article gives me a greater appreciation for the S0C4.

Your tax dollars at work

Considering all the resources NSA has available, shouldn't they be decrypting the CL key(s) and making them publicly available? Then at least taxpayers would get something useful from the money they've spent.

A question of (data) integrity

I find this statement by an RBS spokesman (quoted in The Guardian) to be telling: "If any customer is experiencing issues they should get in touch with our call centres or come into our branches, where our staff will be ready to help." This suggests that they don't have a handle on the data loss and need customers to identify the errors for them.

Appear to be two problems here

First was a failure that blocked customer access to their accounts, then secondly a failure in recovering from the first failure, highlighted by the loss of (what should have been) previously committed transactions (i.e. recent credits are missing. Is anyone missing debits?) As a major mainframe user RBS is likely to be running one or both of IBM's DBMSes, IMS or DB2. The hallmark of these systems is data integrity with recoverabilty. Expertise however in using them is still a necessity no matter how advanced the system becomes. The loss of data shows that this skillset may be lacking at RBS.

Employees will pay

While it's not really clear to me that WD was complicit in doctoring the Doctor's Powerpoints, ultimately it is WD employees who will pay for this. With the books so gravely in the red you can be assured that layoffs will ensue. Yes, his tenure at WD was indeed costly...

Unexpected snooze?

Of course it was snoozing. congress ordered it to when it shutdown the government!

The next Blackberry

After watching Blackberry's descent into oblivion you'd think these guys would take a hint.

Sold!

Thanks for the review. I'm convinced. I'm keeping my 9300. The features of this lowly consumer grade BB clearly outshine anything BB offers today.

Making a late project later

The remark about throwing staff from other Apple products onto the iOS7 fire makes me wonder if anyone there has ever heard of Fred Brooks and "The Mythical Man Month"...

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

flawed

And the additional flaw where it foists the next version on you even though you did not request the download.