Posts by James Anderson 1175 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Apr 2007
Its not actually racist to describe someones ethnicity. Some people are proud of their ancestors.
If you want to experience real patronising ethnic prejudice try going to China where you have a choice of "white ghost" or "black ghost" as ethnicity if you are not Asian.
Incidentally even if the choices were something as PC as "East Asian" and "mixed race" the pull down would still breach several US Federal employment laws -- you are not allowed to ask. Which makes it rather tricky to fulfil the legal requirement to report how many employees you have by ethnic group.
Linus does have a valid point as far as kernel development goes. For x86 you configure and compile a kernel once and it will run on any similarly speced x86 hardware anywhere. For arm you need to configure and build not just for every chip set, but, for every board. The flexibility of the arm design becomes a handicap when deploying an OS.
On the other hand most application level code these days is written in php, Python or Java and it really does not matter which platform you deploy to. If you are unfortunate enough to develop in Enterprise Java you will be stuck with deploying on the exact same release as you developed and tested on but you could easily deploy on different hardware if the specufic J2EE version was available.
Many years ago on the long bus ride from London to Edinburgh and back I used to stare out of the window and wonder about the strange ethereal clumps of brown shiny tumbleweed that would appear on the side of the motorway.
A couple of years later I was in a car with a mate who was attempting to play Hendrix on his 8 track, as the horible cobination of white noise and mechanical crunching was clearly not the guitar genius he ripped the offending cassete out of the player and through it out of the window with a ritual "f*k*ng eight track" curse. Another clump of brown shiny tumbleweed and another mystery solved!
Did you sit through the video of a Panda giving birth. As the hamster sized new Panda popped out the mother looked confused for a few seconds and then went back to munching bamboo. Then one of the keepers rushed in to grab it before the mother sat on it.
Apparently in the wild the average mother has three goes before it realises they need to nurture these strange objects.
I spent the first half of my career in Financial Services IT, writing and implementing systems that put everything under head office control and so they could de-skill or remove branch managers.
The second half of that career was building humongous data warehouses, analytics systems, data lakes etc.. The goal of which was to glean information and insights that a traditional branch manager would have known instantly.
Funny old world.
Well why would the UK impose punishing import tariffs on itself?
Without a trade agreement the importing country is free to decide on how much to charge if anything.
Several countries Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai have zero tariffs on imported goods.
On the other hand without a trade agreement the country you export to can charge as much as it wants!
Which is a major problem for exporters, but, all the project fear panic is directed at imports which would seem to be a non-event. It all seems like a re-run of the pathetic Y2K non event remember "Millenium cupboards" now we have "brexit cupboards" .
Given the massive imbalance between what Britain imports from the EU and what it actually exports to EU countries any tarrif war would hurt the EU far more than the UK. Not that that would bother Junker et al as they are interested in defending thier institutions not the well being and prosperity of the people of Europe.
Even worse there is very little that the UK imports from the EU that it cannot get cheaper and better from countries outside the EU. The goods from the EU counties are only competitive because of tariffs which will no longer apply.
My experience of merchant banking is they are quite the opposite of "Risk Averse".
Certainly in their financial dealings they will take any amount of risk if it generates larger bonuses.
Their IT departments has a penchant for shiny new technologies and bleeding edge software.
The first time I saw a serious Linux box deployed for a serious application was at an investment bank in 2003.
Once you navigate your way through the fog and obfustication of IBM's financial reports it becomes pretty clear that the only real profits are from z/OS mainframes and the associated software and facilities management.
So they are firing the expertise running the only profitable operation -- duh.
They have invested heavily in Watson -- no profits (and very few paying customers) so far.
They are investing heavily in Blockchain ( the worlds most successful snake-oil brand.).
Oh and they make a lot of noise about cloud computing. Where they have lots of customers. Customers like me who spent 20$ in 2011 on a DB2 benchmark and have spent nothing
in the last 7 years -- but cannot find any way to close my customer account.
At least Unisys faded gracefully milking there DOD accounts.
If you look at the price of something digital, you can reasonably expect to get more
for the same price or less.
A good example would be Thinkpads, the one that went into space
a year 2000 T series had a list price of $3,699 by 2014 a T450
was listed under $2000. With 8 times the merory, 16 times the processing power
20 times the disk space etc. etc.
So apple charging twice as much for something just marginally better really
goes against the grain.
Especially when you compare a 2015 Galaxy S6 at $699 with the latest
2019 S10 at $799.
There are defects and there are serious defects.
I have worked on projects which went live which hundreds of defects. But they were along the lines of "Customers title 'Marquis' truncated to 'Marqui' on mail address".
Had we had any "Orders entered on 29th February are lost" type defects another round of fixes and testing would be required.
The important question is how many of those defects were "critical" and who decided what was "critic all"?
And you will lose a second referendum.
If the actions of Barnier and Junker cannot convince you that the EU is a beurocracy interested only in expanding its own powers then a re-moaner you will remain.
But for the majority of the population they will only reinforce the conviction that we should leave the sorry mess.
Oh and if there is another vote will the remain side find anything positive to say about the EU? 'Cos last time they could only come up with scare stories about how we couldn't manage on our own.
Confidentially as a member of an elete military unit cunninly disguised as Drunken Revellers and/or greey haired pensioners I can say the invasion is well under way from the Island Fortress of Ibiza and the mainland stronghold of Benidorm we have established secure beach heads on most of the Mediteranean coast (inland areas being deemed of no strategic importance).
We are currently instructing the natives on the Joys of British culture -- Pints of Stella, lethally hot curry, shopping at Aldi, etc. -- which they have taken to quite well, although queuing and how to make a left turn at a roundabout needs a lot more work.
Whats with all these Spanish owned comapnies in the UK.
Telefonica operate a very reliable service in Spain (albeit with crap customer service).
Sabadell in Spain manage to keep their computer systems up and their customers happy.
AENA run some of the best Airports in the world (Badajas by Madrid is superb example of how to do an airport right) -- but the UK gets Heathrow and Gatwick.
If you gave them Gibraltar back would they leave you alone?
Not so mainframe hardware is under constant development and newer faster shinier machines are released every thre or four years.
Shiney enough that most Banks replace thier production kit every five years or so.
An obsessive commitment to backward compatibility means in most case it just a case of wheeling out the old machine and plugging in the new one.
Software is a different matter the above mentioned obsession with backward compatibility means you can happily run software written in the seventies.
The worst offenders in the obsolete hardware stakes are Windows servers, systems stuck on obsolete operating systems and out of support databases because of the expense and risk involved in each upgrade.
Although my personal best was in 1999 I saw a pdp-11 running a production mail server. It was due to be replaced because no Y2K fix was available. So it went to a museum after 25 years service.
Knowledge is pretty much unforgettable.
You can legislate against gathering knowledge -- it's called spying, or, voyerism and the laws are reasonably effective.
But asking a business to forgret who bought some thing from you or who walked into your shop -- you are now in a legal swamp. You need to keep records about who was sold what, you pay attention when Boris Johnson wanders in but does not actually buy. You cannot legislate forgetting. The current meatspace situation has always been fraught with high profile cases -- slander, gagging orders D notices have always resulted in controversy and mixed public opinion.
So what not go for the Scott McNeally approach and admit you have no privacy on line.
This would work a lot better than thinking you were somehow protected by a government who's elected representatives were funded by the companies that gathered your data.
Www.wunderground.com went from being the best weather channel to absolutely useless within months of IBM borking the weather company.
In doing so it will gradually lose the 1000's of users who contribute thier personal weather station data, which, is also used by the rest of the weather channel sites.
Short sited accounting always trumps long term economics at the new IBM.
Obviously you have not driven up the M6 anytime in the last 30 years.
You would see as you drove through the "desolation of Thatcher" that there are no working factories, Britain does not make anything anyway, apart from the odd formula 1 car, and some high end vacuum cleaners.
The mainframe is the problem.
Not because they are bad, rather, because they are very very good, and very very profitable, unlike the rest of IBMs product lines.
The problem is that 20 years ago the all the Fortune 500 companies would be substantial mainframe customers. Since then NONE of the new entries to the list (think Amazon, UBER, etc. ) use an IBM mainframe. Those companies with mainframes are running old ( and probably excellent ) software, but, I have not seen any major mainframe projects for about 10 years. Nobody is developing new software for these beasts.
While the hardware is actually quite competitive the software license fees are eye wateringly expensive, and, you need a long list just to get the system running.
They have dropped or abandoned so may "consumer" products over the years you would be foolish to pay good money for the latest ( latest as in last to market) attempt to jump on the consumer band wagon.
Bizarrely the current Windows 10 release bundles the Groove music front end even though the service was dumped six moths ago. Does anyone at Redmond actually know what is going on?
"Anonymous rule maker Said" is exactly how the EU works.
It always amazes me how fuzzy thinking the remineralised are. They equate "Europe" with gutters and Tuscan reds so "European" must be a good thing.
Wake up the EU is not Europe it's a self serving out of control beurocracy.
It is strident about senseless rules for making suction less vacuum cleaners but happily goes along with the governments of Poland and Hungary sacking judges, suppressing free speech, and, implementing blatantly racist immigration controls contrary to the EUs own rules.
Most of Europe does not mind the EU as they take the money and ignore the senseless rules. Britain and Germany are the only countries that give the money and obey the rules.
Still no comments option.
There must be thousands of readers like me chomping at the bit to stick one on CA as petty revenge for neglect one once brilliant software packages, thier useless support and price gouging.
Broadcom shareholders should take note, they may have a massive customer base, but, thier customers hate them.
As for patents, I don't see it. Having borked an innovative company CA shut everything down, collect the license fees, and piss off the developers so they leave for greener pastures. Any patents they acquired over the years must be outdated by now.
Should I not have the right to know who owns a European domain name. If I want to know who owns a company I am dealing with I can go to companies house and get a list of the owners. What is so different about a domain name?
The EU presents itself as a champion of the citizen but the net effect of thier meddling is some pointless messages saying " this site uses cookies", and, having to go through the extra step of waiving your GDPR rights anytime you sign up for a half useful service.
It's all a pointless waste of time and money for everybody involved.
Potempkin office --> great historical reference.
However I think Ginny more resembles this lady - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_Dowager_Cixi -
She ruthlessly wielded absolute power over her disintegrating empire.
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