Posts by Chris Miller

Re: Teenager? More like pre-teenager.

You're right, Trevor, it's partly a scale thing - beyond a certain size mainframes remain cost-effective, and IBM and Unisys still sell a lot of them (probably not to new customers, I'd guess). And there are certain requirements that standard Intel boxes can't easily meet - e.g. better than 5x9s availability. But mostly its legacy software. Financial services organisations will have thousands of man-years of mission-critical, (probably) Cobol code with just enough assembler and JCL scattered through it to make migration practically impossible. So it's always the best short-term decision to renew the mainframe for 'just a few more years'. Meanwhile the folks who know how to maintain this stuff are (sadly. literally) dying out.

A politician writes:

But, but ... public money is free, isn't it?

Re: 24/7

Hydro has a non-trivial carbon footprint*. You need a lot of concrete to make the dam (orders of magnitude more per MW than a thermal plant) and if you drown a green valley, decaying (and no longer photosynthesising) plant matter produces a lot of methane. They're one-off costs, so need to be depreciated over the life of the project, but aren't negligible.

* Less so, if you're capturing the power of mountain streams, but Australia isn't Switzerland or Norway.

I claim my £5

I'm not the downvoter, Chalky. But I'm not clear who you think should determine the cost of my holiday. Or how we'd factor in its future cost. I often think it's as well that no-one thought to ask of the renaissance, the enlightenment or the industrial revolution: 'but is it sustainable?' If they had, we might still be living in the medieval state I described.

The Chinese approach to population control - the 'one child per family' policy* - was a pretty desperate response to a pretty desperate problem. It has succeeded in containing their population growth, but left them with major demographic imbalances in both age and gender. As to the Malthusians who believe that the solution to all the world's problems is population reduction, I notice none of them ever volunteer for euthanasia. In my more cynical moments, I sometimes think that 'population reduction' is code for getting rid of large numbers of darker-skinned humans, while leaving those of European descent untouched.

* With suitable exemptions for members of the elite, of course

2.1m at 16:9 equates to a height of just over 1m. Even allowing for the bezel, I don't think it would be too difficult to get through a typical doorway.

Re: cubic litres?

Cubic litres is the standard volume measurement in the version of string theory I'm working on that has 9 space-like dimensions.

Juan Ponce de Leon was the Spanish discoverer of Florida (or at least, the first European to get there, the place was already full of Seminoles), where there's a town named after him. He is commemorated by the USS Ponce*, whose crew have difficulty understanding why Brits tend to find their ship's name so amusing.

* Also on Star Trek, apparently.

Re: I like Ribbon

Correct, and if you don't want to see it all the time, just right-click and select 'Minimize the Ribbon' (you've now got more screen real estate than you did under the old menu system). Plus, you have the 'Quick Access Toolbar' for one-click access to all your commonly used functions.

Moan about MS as much as you like (I certainly do), but they spend millions every year on usability research. When they introduce a new feature, such as the ribbon, it's the result of hundreds of hours of testing and monitoring the reactions of both new and experienced users to the revised interface.

Re: The 95% Rule.

It's often quoted, and is broadly true of many software products - e.g. Photoshop - and probably 'real' products, too. I'd say it's more like 10% of functionality - but the point is that everyone uses the same 5% of the functionality (and some power users use >>50% of the functionality), but then each person makes use of a different 5% of the functionality to make up their total of 10%.

Take a large corporate office and tell them you're going to remove some random 'minor' feature from Office. Whichever one you pick, there'll be a small but vociferous minority shouting they can no longer do their job (or at least, it's going to take them twice as long).

Re: "I've no prejudices"

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'

I'm not sure you've quite grasped the concept of 'thinking' either.

National Rail Enquiries - saves me dashing for a train that's actually running late/cancelled.

@Tom

Quite - but I think that would only constitute a single request.

Re: It would be conjecture...but

I don't agree it's fundamentally wrong. 99.99% of the population (which is what the OP was asking about) haven't taken out interest rate swaps, and so aren't affected. And if your firm is going bust because of an interest rate swap, they shouldn't have taken out the swap - Barclays fiddling the rate may be the last straw, but the putative firm would still be in difficulties without it. (Swaps have been mis-sold by people on commission - who'd have guessed?)

And derivative trading is essentially zero-sum - for every position taken, someone else is taking the opposite stance (though I'm sure there are some exceptions) - this is completely different from buying Apple stock in 1980, since when you would have made a 22,000% profit, but no-one else can point to a balancing loss. The fact that some middle-men (including traders) can make a lot of money by creaming a bit (or a lot) off the top doesn't affect that - and I agree that this increases the wealth of the economy, and may even increase tax take a bit.

@AC 13:46

The trouble with models is that anything can be made consistent with them if you have enough different models to start with (and also if you permit retrospective tweaks to be made). What you need is for the IPCC (or someone) to make predictions about long-term climate patterns that can then be tested against the real world.

At the moment, when results disagree with model predictions we either select a different model (from the vast array available) or change some parameter that affects the rate of cloud production (say).

Re: You must work for HS2

You're quoting from a publicity piece put together by the engineering consortia that would benefit from HS2 as though it's some peer-reviewed piece of physics. You then refer to anyone who draws attention to the gaping holes in this puffery as a brainless bumpkin.

The original (paper thin) cost-justification of HS2 has been blown out of the water - even the PR pieces on the DfT web site have to admit the financial return is now "low", which means to anyone with knowledge of government infrastructure projects that it will make a thundering great loss. At a time when we're closing hospitals and sacking police because we can't afford them, spending vast sums on a vanity project like HS2, which isn't even a good investment for the railways, is beyond idiotic.

Since this is an IT site, I've a thought for you to engage your mighty brain on. How about spending a small part of this money on providing FTTH, allowing more people to work from home and eliminating some of the need to shuttle between London and Birmingham? Let's have some 21st century technology, rather than 19th century.

If you don't work for HS2, it must be their PR agency.

Re: Haggis in a tin?

Indeed. If it isn't stuffed into a sheep's stomach, it isn't haggis.

The long arm of the law

I assume you don't live in Germany or the Netherlands, either? Apple lawyers - coming to a courtroom near you.

Re: Surely

The point is that 120GWh is around 0.013% of the total UK energy consumption. If the goal is to reduce CO2 output by 20% (say), we'll need 1,500 such initiatives to achieve our goal. I don't think Lewis is saying we should leave everything switched on unnecessarily, just that if a significant reduction in CO2 is your goal, it's not going to be achieved by lots of trivial measures.

Or, as Prof MacKay puts it: "if we all do a little, then we'll achieve a little".

Re: Cute.. but..

@Tom - at least with B&W you'll get decent sound. B&O kit looks beautiful, but has distinctly average performance. Come to think of it, they may have identified their target market very precisely.

Re: Three things

Another problem - all the clearing banks and many more large (mainly financial services) institutions are dependent on mainframe systems. The folk that have spent a lifetime working with them (like 'Bob') are nearing retirement - they need to be replaced. But how do you get bright young graduates to work on mainframes. They don't want to work with CA7 and CICS/Cobol, they want to work with Python and Javascript - which will look far better on their CV. Migrating from these systems isn't a realistic option, at least not with a timescale that isn't measured in decades.

I'm not sure that there's a solution to this problem, and if there is, what it would look like. But if it isn't addressed pretty soon, we're going to be seeing more such incidents.