* Posts by JohnMcL

28 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Dec 2010

Carly Fiorina makes like HP and splits – ex-CEO quits White House race

JohnMcL

As prez she'd probably merge the USA with Lithuania, giving herself a bonus for doing so, and outsource all government work to India.

Private clouds kinda suck, you know?

JohnMcL

private clouds better

Your PHB has read somewhere that clouds are the thing so if you don't call them clouds he probably won't know what you're talking about.

Are private clouds good? You bet ... unless of course you prefer you prfer to put your major data assets in someone else's hands and trust that (a) your data is safe from disaster and "leakage" and (b) when the excreta hits the ventilation equipment that the service provider agrees that your high priority is also his high priority. For most companies IT is their lifeblood; it involves every aspect of the organization and therefore how the company makes its income. Willing to cede control to someone else somewhere else? You'd have to be crazy.

Stop, look, listen: Don't be 2016's DevOps roadkill – here's how to survive

JohnMcL

DevOps - another structure for the incompetent

Like (fr)agile, DevOps is just another "safety jacket" for the incompetent who can't communicate properly without someone else setting out how communication should be done. These incompetents, many in management, are responsible for forcing competent people into jackets with strange sleeves and unreachable buckles.

If the IT business is too difficult for you then get out of it find something more suited to your abilities, like basket weaving.

Scouts' downed Compass database won't be back 'til autumn

JohnMcL

Where I am it's already autumn.

In future recognise the GLOBAL nature of the Internet and The Register. Say "NH autumn" if you must, or Q3 (as in third quarter of the year) or just say "about October".

Blackhat: Michael Mann brings an informed cybercrime yarn to the silver screen

JohnMcL

I thought you meant the other Michael mann, of hockey-stick fame.

hive mind informs climate change believers and sceptics

JohnMcL

Re: Cultural marxism

What a lot of (insert word here)! Fossil fuel companies have been big backers of Greenpeace etc and for many years an Exxon employee (Khesoggi, I think) was active in the writing of IPCC reports. You also seem ignorant about tobacco and cancer although its unclear if you mean for smokers (connection true but in legal action people are allowed to make any defence they wish and in this case there was an obligation to stockholders) or for second-hand smoke (the key studies of which were flawed, as S. Fred Singer observed).

If you have any evidence that CO2 poses a significant danger then try posting that instead of baseless ad hominem attacks, actions that I think are very characteristic of "believers" but missing from the study reported in the article.

JohnMcL

Re: I don't know for sure but...

Fouriers notions were only theory, as were those from Arrhenius. In theory, theory and practice and no different but in practice they are. About 17 years without global warming despite all the CO2 in the atmosphere makes that perfectly clear.

JohnMcL

Re: Shocked

Can we take legal action against certain "experts" for scientific fraud, after all they seem to benefit from the porkies they tell?

The problem is that I can't see scientific bodies taking such action because it would have a negative impact on most, if not all, of their members because research funding would be cut and reputations trashed. I also can't see governments taking action because the politicians fear what disgruntled brainwashed voters might do.

JohnMcL

Re: what's most depressing

Paul, the gaping flaw in your argument is that to take the action that you say we should have taken would very likely have incurred enormous costs for little if any benefit. You also seem to think that global warming (or whatever you like to call it) will be overwhelmingly negative. Should any global warming happen there will certainly be benefits to some people, such as increase agriculture further north (Canada, Europe, Asia) and statistics show that the deaths from cold far out-number deaths from heat.

JohnMcL

The problem is that far too many people who are incredibly ignorant about science and data analysis think themselves qualified to tell the public their misguided and ill-informed (and often baseless) opinion.

It doesn't help though that those who comment on blogs usually need to condense their argument into 100 words or so rather than show their detailed reasoning or supporting material.

'Look into my eyes: You are feeling very worried about the climate ... so worried'

JohnMcL

Anonymous coward, you don't seem to be a regular Register reader.

Try reading http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/19/no_scientific_consensus_on_2014_hottest_year_on_record_claims/

JohnMcL

Re: Didn't have to look

I suggest you read the latest IPCC report more thoroughly. It admits that climate models exaggerate the influence of greenhouse gases, that 111 or 114 predicted warming from 1998 to 2012 but it didn't occur, that the models don't seem to have fundamentals correct.

Dig a bit deeper and you find that the same models are used to estimate the human influence on temperature. (It's a bit of a joke really because all the models do is what they are told to do, so running them with and without greenhouse gases ONLY indicates how sensitive the models are to GHG's). My point is that the estimates of human influence have no credibility whatsoever.

"The facts about human-caused CO2 emissions", to use your words, are (a) the "experts" have no clear idea about the influence of CO2 in the real world and (b) predictions of future temperatures have no credibility. In fact it's not even clear that we should do anything at all to limit CO2 emisisons.

JohnMcL

Re: @skelband

You have to remember that people form their opinions on the basis of information received, and that usually means from the mainstream media.

The dolts in the mainstream media have swallowed the baseless claims from the IPCC and UNFCC hook, line and sinker, and now they think they'd lose face if they changed their minds. The trick is to go quiet on the subject for a few months and then start to have their journalists question everything said by both the warmists and the sceptics. Over time it will be seen that sceptics have far more data on their side than the alarmists.

JohnMcL

Your idea would have merit only if we could exclude scientists with vested interests.

Let's see how that works... A climate scientist wants a job and the only funded jobs are those who research proposals show that the intention is to try to prove or otherwise support the IPCC/UNFCCC claims. Do you think the scientist will rock the boat? Do you think his or her employer will allow him or her to rock the boat? Do you really think that the opinion of this scientist is worth anything at all?

Your claims about the "fossil fuel and associated industries" are so mendacious that it makes the claims of politicians seem positively angelic. Still, what do mendacity and ignorance matter in climate science given what "experts" say on the subject.

No, the Linux leap second bug WON'T crash the web

JohnMcL

Re: Time delay

Australians were the first to go down ? Apart from the unfortunate choice of words, what happened in closer-to-the-dateline New Zealand? Does the journo think NZ is ten years behind everywhere else?

Erik Meijer: AGILE must be destroyed, once and for all

JohnMcL

Re: A few good pints

A software tester friend of mine refers to Agile as Fragile (and he has an alternative and shorter word for Scrum) . Testing is a nightmare when the client keeps changing his mind about what's wanted and there's either no written specs or the specs keep changing. Also, software testers are almost as rare as hen's teeth and yet every Fragile project needs at least one tester.

Nork-ribbing flick The Interview AXED: Sony caves under hack terror 'menace'

JohnMcL

Re: Grow some balls!

What fool at Sony gave the okay to a comedy about a communist dictator of a country previously described as part of the Axis of Evil?

Will Sony now produce comedy about the prophet Mohammed? That will have the audience rolling in the aisles, not!

Shhhhh! It's a Swiss Sunday shutdown. Kill the lawnmower, punish the kids with CHEESE

JohnMcL

I worked in Zurich for almost 5 years. Switzerland is a very comfortable and very organised country. The creation of Switzerland, from separate regions/valleys, took diplomacy and compromise. Even now the country has four official languages, with English pressing at the door to be a fifth. Everyone seems to understand that they have a social obligation for the smooth running of the place. In exchange they get the opportunity to vote in referendums every three months because the parliament does what the people want, not like in other countries where it's the other way around. I'd go back there tomorrow if there was a job in my area of specialisation.

Forrester says Australia, not China, is next boom market for cloud

JohnMcL

Jeez Bruce! You figure us in Oz are foolish enough to hand over our data to organisations that we have no control over and which might not even store it in Australia and therefore not be subject to Australian law. And if the whole thing goes tits up you reckon we should be happy with "Sorry. It's offshore and we can't find it?"

Trust someone else with the life-blood of your business? You'd have to be joking. At some point their priorities will take precedence over yours and you'll be the one to suffer.

Royal Navy parks 470 double-decker buses on Queen Elizabeth

JohnMcL

Re: You think aircraft carriers are expensive...

This might bring new meaning to "floating point" problems in software.

Windows 8.1 Update: Throws desktop drones a bone but still as TOUCHY as ever

JohnMcL

Re: Windows 8 was built for one reason only

Windows 8 was aimed at the idiot social media market, the market that thinks the world want to know every time someone, not even a Kardashian, sneezes. Businesses don't need or want this rubbish, nor do people who actually use their PCs for something more than email and browsing (twits using twitter and ??? using faecesbook). Microsoft should split their products into a "Lite" version for the idiots and a "Classic" version for serious users, then let the product streams diverge but share what is reasonably shareable.

NBN to be built even if cost-benefit analysis shows no ROI

JohnMcL

Oz telecomms infrastructure

The situation would have been different if Australia's telecommunications infrastructure had not been included in the opening up of the telephone services market. It's pretty obvious that the infrastructure had to be given to Telstra or its share price would have been lower, but doing so forced Optus to build its own physical network. The more sensible option was to have a single government owned entity manage the infrastructure, upgrade it as necessary and sell capacity to the telephone services company. Think of it much like an organisation owning the railway tracks and having multiple train companies pay to use those tracks.

Spinning rust and tape are DEAD. The future's flash, cache and cloud

JohnMcL

Re: Out of sight, out of mind.

Out of sight, out of mind ... and very likely out of your control.

Too bad if the cloud supplier goes belly-up. Too bad if a serious problem means the data is lost and there's no backup. But hey, it's probably cheap!

FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS: Microsoft faces prising XP from Big Biz

JohnMcL

Why go to Windows 8 ...

... when it's pretty obviously aimed at the "social media" morons who think everyone hangs on their Facebook and Twitter utterances. Windows 8.1 seems to be an attempt to put lipstick on a pig.

Windows 7 allowed people to get actual work done, and earlier than that Windows XP offered even more freedom from the Borg's diktats about how work was to be accomplished.

JohnMcL

Re: I don't think so

"If it ain't broke, you don't fix it."

NB. This does not apply to aeroplanes!

Can't agree on a coding style? Maybe the NEW YORK TIMES can help

JohnMcL

I prefer braces to appear on the line after the condition and I prefer tabs to spaces, but that's me.

What annoys me far more than any spaces/tabs and brace position argument is when programmers are too lazy to include decent comments about what their code is doing. I've seen functions of over 150 lines with zero meaningful comments. It's stupid, it's unprofessional and it wastes the time of anyone who has to pick his or her way through the code to figure out what it's doing.

And if you've got decent comments there's no need for really long variable names that look like they should be the names of Welsh towns.

Internet fraud still stings suckers

JohnMcL

According to an EU directive, the word "gullible" is being removed from dictionaries because it causes offence.

New NASA model: Doubled CO2 means just 1.64°C warming

JohnMcL

response

The IPCC did not get one paragraph wrong its report. It got a lot wrong and a lot more are biased.

Google "'Glaciergate' highlights IPCC flaws" for the gory details.